Outlook "Check Names" dialog on address@domain

Asked By Random Developer
18-Nov-09 04:57 PM
Earn up to 0 extra points for answering this tough question.

Within Outlook 2003, I'm prevented from sending an email to an address of the form "address@machine" because the "Check Names" dialog appears without an option to continue.  Can anyone offer insight on why this dialog is appearing and/or how to bypass it and send my message?

My outgoing SMTP server is Exchange.  I am testing an SMTP server on my workstation and have set up Exchange to route emails to my workstation.  This has been verified by sending emails using Opera's mail client and programmatically, though the same Exchange server, and observing the emails being received by my workstation.

Thanks for your time and any help you can provide.

  I hate to remind you at the obvious...

Rolf Jaeger replied to Random Developer
03-Dec-09 10:19 PM

The e-mail addresses you have posted as examples for the problem you are asking about are indeed invalid e-mail addresses: it is missing the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .us, .net, ...). Therefore no mail server would be able to properly send it. It seems that Outlook is trying to help you here.

Best wishes,
Rolf

  Sorry, you've misunderstood...

Random Developer replied to Rolf Jaeger
03-Dec-09 11:05 PM

Hi Rolf,

Sorry, but you've misunderstood my question.  It pertains to the sending of email to an server on my internal network.  As such, the top-level domain is unnecessary (and undesired).  Opera's built-in mail client and Outlook Web Access are able to send emails successfully of the form user@server with Exchange 2007 as the outgoing SMTP server.  Please educate yourself by reading section 3.4 of RFC 2822 to learn what a valid email address is; user@server is indeed a valid email address.

Thanks for trying.

  One more thought

Rolf Jaeger replied to Random Developer
04-Dec-09 03:11 PM

Thanks for further clarifying your situation. Now I can't help wondering whether you might have to convince MS Outlook to comply with the standard (BTW I find the Wikipidia entry on e-mail address syntax  much more legible than the raw standard). You could of course also try to suppress Outlook's automatic address checking. Here's how to do that in case you haven't tried that yet (it's a bit buried):

Tools | Options | E-Mail Options | Advanced E-Mail Options: uncheck the 'Automatic name chacking' checkbox

Hope this helped,
Rolf

  Sadly, unchecking "Automatic name checking" doesn't affect the behavior
Random Developer replied to Rolf Jaeger
04-Dec-09 03:20 PM
This checkbox deals with checking an email address against various address books.
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