rfc2822 April 2001

3.4. Address Specification

   Addresses occur in several message header fields to indicate senders
   and recipients of messages.  An address may either be an individual
   mailbox, or a group of mailboxes.

address         =       mailbox / group

mailbox         =       name-addr / addr-spec

name-addr       =       [display-name] angle-addr

angle-addr      =       [CFWS] "<" addr-spec ">" [CFWS] / obs-angle-addr

group           =       display-name ":" [mailbox-list / CFWS] ";"
              [CFWS]
display-name    =       phrase

mailbox-list    =       (mailbox *("," mailbox)) / obs-mbox-list

address-list    =       (address *("," address)) / obs-addr-list

   A mailbox receives mail.  It is a conceptual entity which does not
   necessarily pertain to file storage.  For example, some sites may
   choose to print mail on a printer and deliver the output to the
   addressee's desk.  Normally, a mailbox is comprised of two parts: (1)
   an optional display name that indicates the name of the recipient
   (which could be a person or a system) that could be displayed to the
   user of a mail application, and (2) an addr-spec address enclosed in
   angle brackets ("<" and ">").  There is also an alternate simple form
   of a mailbox where the addr-spec address appears alone, without the
   recipient's name or the angle brackets.  The Internet addr-spec
   address is described in section 3.4.1.

   Note: Some legacy implementations used the simple form where the
   addr-spec appears without the angle brackets, but included the name
   of the recipient in parentheses as a comment following the addr-spec.
   Since the meaning of the information in a comment is unspecified,
   implementations SHOULD use the full name-addr form of the mailbox,
   instead of the legacy form, to specify the display name associated
   with a mailbox.  Also, because some legacy implementations interpret
   the comment, comments generally SHOULD NOT be used in address fields
   to avoid confusing such implementations.

   When it is desirable to treat several mailboxes as a single unit
   (i.e., in a distribution list), the group construct can be used.  The
   group construct allows the sender to indicate a named group of
   recipients. This is done by giving a display name for the group,
   followed by a colon, followed by a comma separated list of any number
   of mailboxes (including zero and one), and ending with a semicolon.
   Because the list of mailboxes can be empty, using the group construct
   is also a simple way to communicate to recipients that the message
   was sent to one or more named sets of recipients, without actually
   providing the individual mailbox address for each of those
   recipients.