Sean Walther's Blog

Maximum Length of an Email Address is…

A question posted on About.com, “Is the Length of an Email Adresses Limited? If Yes, What is the Maximum” (yes, I know it’s not proper grammar, but it’s a quote).

The official result, 320 characters.

It is made up by:

• 64 characters for the email name
• 255 characters for the domain
• 1 character for the “@”

How many people now have to change that email field in the database from varchar(255)?

It’s been making the rounds on the internet lately, thought I’d publish it as I didn’t know this either.

UPDATE: 2009.06.24

According to a recent, and informative, article at www.eph.co.uk, Email Address Length FAQ — email addresses are actually limited to 254 characters.

While you can technically have a 254 character email address, this information is mostly only useful to developers implementing email addresses.  It is very likely that your email will not work if it is longer than, say, 50 characters.  Even if officially your email address is supported, think of how annoying it will be to notify everywhere you want to set up your email, that they don’t implement email addresses properly.

This sounds like good news, as 254 characters is perfect for varchar(255) fields.

Here’s a blog that posted a graph of all email addresses in their system: What’s the average length of an email address?

Tags: email, email address, email length, length, maximum, question, RFC3696

3 Comments to Maximum Length of an Email Address is…

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