Outlook 2003 does not recognize a comma as an e-mail address separator (820868)



The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
  • Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager

SYMPTOMS

If one of the following situations are true
  • You click a mailto hyperlink on a Web page that contains multiple e-mail addresses that are separated by a comma (,).

    -or-
  • You click a mailto hyperlink in an HTML formatted e-mail message that contains multiple e-mail addresses that are separated by a comma.
you may receive the following error message when you try to send the e-mail message
Microsoft Outlook doesn't recognize
"E-Mail_address1,E-Mail_address2,...,E-Mail_addressN"
If you used a comma to separate several addresses: click Cancel, change the commas to semicolons, and try to send again.
Would you like to:
Create a new address for "E-Mail_address1,E-Mail_address2,...,E-Mail_addressN"?
Change to:This may list some suggestions to replace the e-mail addresses with. Generally, this is empty and no suggestions are present.


where E-Mail_address1, E-Mail_address2, and E-Mail_addressN are the multiple e-mail addresses that are separated by commas in the mailto hyperlink that you clicked.

CAUSE

This problem occurs because, by default, Outlook 2003 does not recognize the comma as an e-mail address separator.

RESOLUTION

Follow these steps to configure Outlook 2003 to recognize the comma as a valid e-mail address separator:
  1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
  2. Click E-Mail Options, and then click Advanced E-Mail Options.
  3. Under When sending a message, click to select the Allow comma as address separator check box.
Note You can use a semi-colon (;) to separate e-mail addresses when you click to select the Allow comma as address separator check box.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

Modification Type:MinorLast Reviewed:1/6/2006
Keywords:kbConfig kbprb kberrmsg kbnofix KB820868 kbAudEndUser