Troubles with emails started with "-"(dash)

Question

We have Ruby On Rails application with some emails subscription. It has mailer class inherited from ActionMailer:

class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
...
end

Everything ok, except one thing - some users have email addresses with "-" at begin. It occur errors when I'm trying send email to "[email protected]":

sendmail: invalid option -- u
sendmail: invalid option -- s
sendmail: invalid option -- u
sendmail: fatal: usage: sendmail [options]

How could I escape this character(and maybe some similar) for ActionMailer?

Thanks

Answer 1

The URI.escape method although deprecated does take a second parameter that lets you mark what's unsafe like so

URI.escape("[email protected]", '-')
=> "%[email protected]"

CGI escape which replaces URI.escape doesn't seem to have the same functionality but for a single case like this it might work.