Windows – Log in to FTP using Windows Explorer with @ in the username

ftputf-8windowswindows-explorer

I need to set up a connection to an FTP server, but there are a couple of caveats. I CANNOT use third-party software (period). It has to be done in Windows Explorer.

The other caveat is that there is an @ symbol in both the login & the password. So I'm trying to connect, using Windows FTP to an address that looks like;
user@name:pass@word@FTP.server.com

Is there anything I can do as far as escape characters go maybe? This server uses UTF-8 which has @ as %40, but I haven't been able to get that to work.

Best Answer

I set up a TCP server using nc. By using the following URL I got the following output (I greeted and answered the client by hand). The version of Internet Explorer I used was Internet Explorer 6 from modern.ie.

ftp://user%40name:pass%40word@192.0.2.2

220 hi
USER user@name
331 ok
PASS pass@word
230 ok
opts utf8 on

It looks to me like escaping with %40 works just fine. If it doesn't work in your case, I'd check if there isn't some server problem. Ideally, try to log in with another client just to check your setup. Internet Explorer has no issue supporting percent-encoding.

Related Question