Email addresses in all caps

[jack]

Poll #14460 Email addresses in all caps

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 34

View Respondents

If you need to fill in a form in all caps and it asks for your email address, what do you do

View Answers

Put it in all caps, my email address isn't case sensitive
15 (44.1%)

Put ti in all caps, I assume my email address isn't case sensitive though I haven't checked
5 (14.7%)

Use the correct case, on principle
18 (52.9%)

Use the correct case, my email address is case sensitive
1 (2.9%)

My email address is in upper case anyway
0 (0.0%)

My email address contains no letters
0 (0.0%)

We should treat email addresses as case insensitive because intermediate servers may not respect case
7 (20.6%)

We should treat email addresses as case insensitive because having two email addresses differing in case is obviously a mistake waiting to happen, so no one SHOULD rely on that even if it's technically allowed
16 (47.1%)

Other
2 (5.9%)

 

Comments

[simont]

I tend to assume that 'use block capitals only' is probably part of the Standard Form Boilerplate which Best Practices require that you use for every form you design, whereas 'enter your email address here' was written by the person actually designing that particular form, and therefore the latter takes precedence if the two conflict.

[jack]

That makes sense. I'd forgotten that people might design Important Forms without knowing how...

[chess]

It generally makes sense to demand block capitals because it's generally easier to tell apart capital letters even in terrible handwriting than it is to tell apart lower-case letters; I would expect most form-designers not to even think about whether email was case-sensitive or not.

[redbird]

Also, I have taken to putting at least the username part in all caps when filling things in by hand, because my lower-case r's aren't as obviously r's as my upper-case ones.

And now I have double-checked: if I log on to my ISP and tell it "finger VR" it gives ??? to indicate it never heard of that username, but if I explicitly tell it to send mail locally to VR it is delivered to vr.

Of course, that may be saying more about my ISP than the net at large: this is a place where if I type "mail" at the command line, it tells me to use "Mail" if I really want the old Berkeley mail program, but that they "strongly recommend" mutt, pine, or the mail mode in emacs.

[jack]

I have taken to putting at least the username part in all caps when filling things in by hand,

That makes sense. (Though you might as well do the whole thing lower case, aren't domain names ACTUALLY case insensitive, or did that not apply to subdomains?)

Of course, that may be saying more about my ISP than the net at large

LOL :)

[redbird]

I tend to do the domain name lower-case because that's physically easier for me, and "panix.com" is pretty legible in my handwriting. Domain names are indeed case-insensitive, and while I'm not sure about subdomains, it doesn't apply here, there isn't one in my email address.

[jack]

Ah, right.

That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure if I was missing anything.

[chess]

Regardless of what we should do, I would still expect people to use case sensitive email addresses and that anything I did should be set up to handle them, in the traditional internet 'be strict in what you send and lax in what you accept' fashion.

[jack]

I don't think "be strict in what you send and lax in what you accept" is always right, but I agree, if you're implementing such a system, you should at least handle case-sensitive addresses (especially as you don't have to DO anything, just not change the case, which is fraught anyway if you get non-roman-alphabet entries).

[gareth_rees]

I renewed my passport recently, and although the form asks you to use ALL CAPS, there is a little note explaining that you can use mixed or lower case when filling in your e-mail address.

[jack]

Oh, well done gov (though could be better done).

I had a feeling I'd seen that written somewhere, but I couldn't remember where.

[catyak]

If I do it in lower case and hand the form to the recipient in person, they usually ask what my email address is and write it in block caps anyway. Starting with LL makes it highly ambiguous if I don't use caps.

Unless I don't actually want to give them my email address, in which case they get a throw-away one in lower case and I don't care if they get it wrong.

d

[naath]

If I'm handwriting this form (and I probably am if it says "all caps") I'll put my email address in caps because my handwriting is awful and my email address isn't made of common words so you can't infer what the words are from the basic shape. I reckon this is why forms say "all caps" on them.

Since addresses can be case sensitive people ought to accept lower case addresses though.

[verazea]

It depends on which email address I give, but the one I'd normally put on forms I'll always handwrite it in all caps as my handwriting is awful and it wouldn't be clear otherwise.

[gerald_duck]

I tickied that my e-mail address is case-sensitive.

In fact it's not quite, but my spam trap's scoring is configured to penalise senders that capitalise the e-mail address. BT has fallen foul of this in the past and frankly it serves them right.