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I have a gmail address, say, x@gmail.com and a me.com address, say y@me.com. If I use the web based iCloud email client for my me.com account, and I send an email to the following 3 versions of the gmail address:

  1. x@gmail.com
  2. <x@gmail.com>
  3. "x" <x@gmail.com>

Only #3 gets delivered! Neither the me.com or gmail.com account have any forwarding or filters of any kind. x is a string of alpha-only characters. How can this be?

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Nor can I when I use a different gmail acct. It seems to be just this one. I'll also add that when I do the same experiment sending from a yahoo.com email account, all 3 are delivered. –  Robot Mar 4 '12 at 17:29
When you say "alpha-only" characters, you mean [A-Za-z]? No punctuation or anything? Diacritics? Unicode? Just ASCII upper and lower case letters before the @ sign? Curiouser and curiouser. –  Daniel Lawson Apr 10 '12 at 4:36

1 Answer 1





Received: from mail-relay-03.basecamp.com (mail-relay-03.basecamp.com [])
    by spool.mail.whatever.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 412011162EA
    for <bmike@whatever.com>; Wed,  3 Apr 2013 15:33:01 +0200 (CEST)
Received: from jobs-01.sc-chi-int.37signals.com (bigip-floating-public.sc-chi-int.37signals.com [])
    by virt-gw.sc-chi.37signals.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 071654440F
    for <bmike@whatever.com>; Wed,  3 Apr 2013 13:33:00 +0000 (UTC)
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