Is email@“happy@guy.com” a valid email address

email

This comment led me to RFC 5322 § 3.4.1 which reads:

An addr-spec is a specific Internet identifier that contains a locally
interpreted string followed by the at-sign character ("@", ASCII value
64) followed by an Internet domain. 

The locally interpreted string is either a quoted-string or a dot-atom.

If the string can be represented as a dot-atom (that is, it contains no
characters other than atext characters or "." surrounded by atext  
characters), then the dot-atom form SHOULD be used and the quoted-  
string form SHOULD NOT be used.  Comments and folding white space   
SHOULD NOT be used around the "@" in the addr-spec.

And we can see what atext is here.

atext           =       ALPHA / DIGIT / ; Any character except controls,
                        "!" / "#" /     ;  SP, and specials.
                        "$" / "%" /     ;  Used for atoms
                        "&" / "'" /
                        "*" / "+" /
                        "-" / "/" /
                        "=" / "?" /
                        "^" / "_" /
                        "`" / "{" /
                        "|" / "}" /
                        "~"

Putting this all together, does that mean that the email address email@"happy@guy.com" is actually a valid address, since the quotes allow the usage of the @ symbol?

Best Answer

No it's not valid.

The part after the @ is the domain ("happy@guy.com" in your example).

You can't have a domain name with @ symbol in.

What are the valid characters for a domain name and how long can it be?

Also check out RFC 1035 2.3.1:

They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen.

More info:

Related Question