How do I send an email to an address with a dash in it?

Question

Is it me or is there a bug in the MailAddress class in System.Net.Mail?

This code will always throw an excpetion:

MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();
mail.From = new MailAddress("[email protected]");     
mail.To.Add("[email protected]");

mail.Subject = "Test email"
mail.IsBodyHtml = true;
mail.Body = "<b>Does not work</b>";

//Connect to server and send message.               
SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient();
smtp.Host = "mailserver.me.com";
smtp.Send(mail);

The exception I get is this:

System.FormatException: The specified string is not in the form required for an
e-mail address.

However, according to wiki, a dash is a valid character in the local part.

Does anyone know a way of using the System.Net.Mail classes to send an email to someone with a dash in the email address?

Answer 1

Are you sure? It works for me (I cut and paste your code replacing your dummy mail server with my actual mail server.) I just get delivery notifications that the message to [email protected] is undeliverable.

Since you have an exception message, I guess it's real. Is it possibly an encoding issue?