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Your opinions please.

In our system the decision was made that all fields (except notes) will be forced into uppercase. I don't like it, but the system's intended users aren't very computer literate, so for line-of-business use I suppose it is acceptable.

When it comes to email addresses however, would you also force them into uppercase, against the lowercase convention?

Andre Luus
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  • Out of curiosity, what is the reason for upper-casing all fields? – buruzaemon Apr 28 '11 at 13:34
  • Mostly since the data capturers/end users won't be disciplined enough to capitalize correctly. So on the screens in the system and on reports forcing everything to uppercase just looks better. Apparently. – Andre Luus Apr 28 '11 at 13:48
  • @buruzaemon: Historically, data stored on a mainframe system was all upper case. This is because early printers could only print in upper case. Even after mixed case printers were developed, people kept using upper case for data consistency. Now, I have no idea if this is why Andre's business users are partial to upper case. But it's the reason a lot of businesses maintain their data in upper case. – Gilbert Le Blanc Apr 28 '11 at 15:52
  • I see. It is often the case that users are the weakest link in the system. And @Gilbert, thanks for the history lesson. I often come across uppercased data and other such mainframe-style legacy practices. – buruzaemon Apr 29 '11 at 21:59

2 Answers2

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The part before @ "Local Part" is "locally interpreted" (see RFC 2822 §3.4.1).

This could include being case-sensitive. Whether any email processing agents support case sensitivity is another question.

Richard
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  • Following your answer I've read up on things myself somewhat. It seems that for compatibility we will have to preserve case in email addresses. Thanks! – Andre Luus Apr 29 '11 at 06:47
  • Read through the below answer to explore more from an end user point of view. http://ux.stackexchange.com/a/16849/38089 and the actual specification http://email.about.com/od/emailbehindthescenes/f/email_case_sens.htm – Nagarajan S R Nov 12 '13 at 05:47
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Email addresses are case-insensitive, so it doesn't matter. Upper case would be fine.

Ernest Friedman-Hill
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