Saturday, February 11, 2012

"To" field error in Gmail: a weird e-Mail or Gmail problem and easy solution.

"The address "​[properly formed address]" in the "To" field was not recognized. Please make sure that all addresses are properly formed.

I received this message after trying to make contact with someone offering a job by replying to their e-mail address in Gmail. The address was proper: no spaces, no unusual punctuation...

If found that someone else had encountered this issue, which later resolved, but no solution, here, http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2f751498eaf2a3ea&hl=en

The job requirements did include, "Computer Literacy", however, which among business types is inspeak for "Comfortable Microsoft Product User", and this was a personal assistant position. That bugged me from the moment of encountering this problem. It was not that the address they had provided was originally well formed (there was a space inside of it), but I took care of that before sending.

What I suspected is perhaps an encoding method problem in one of the characters that resulted in an incompatibility: inconceivable these days maybe, but nonetheless suspected. I copied the address into a text editor and then back in to Gmail's "To" field and tried to send: same error.

So I put it back in to the editor, then below re-typed it, took that result, pasted it in to the "To" field, and pushed send...

The mailing was successful.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

HI, I had the same problem and typing it in an editor and then pasting it worked. Is there an explanation yet?

a guy said...

Hello! I suspect the copy-pasted text was nonstandard encoding below the surface. One probably needn't type first in the text-editor, rather retyping it was simply to use standard encoding: I only even put it back in the text editor to ensure I duplicated it exactly. :)