Why are email addresses sometimes in angle-brackets?

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Summary: Email addresses were meant for computers to use to route email. Angle brackets are used when a more human-readable name accompanies the email address.

Every so often I see email addresses listed like this: Name <myemail@hotmail.com> or even myemail@hotmail.com <myemail@hotmail.com> What's it all mean, especially that last one?

Well, the last one is someone just not filling in some information in their email program like they're supposed to.

But in general that format you're seeing is just the email protocol recognizing that most people don't think in terms of email addresses; they think in terms of names.

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By now you probably realize that an email address looks like this:

emailname@somedomain

Where "emailname" defines the person or account that is to receive the email and "somedomain" usually indicates the email service, like "hotmail.com", or the domain on which the person has their email delivered, like "pugetsoundsoftware.com" in my case.

The problem is that you and I don't think in terms of email names. (OK, you don't. Us computer geeks are often another story. )

So this format was devised:

descriptive name <emailname@somedomain>

The real "email address" part is enclosed in angle brackets and is preceded by something more human-readable like a name.

Now, most of the time this is entirely transparent to you. For example when you configure Microsoft Outlook you'll see two fields, one for Your name, and one for E-mail address:

When you send an email, Outlook automatically puts those two together into the "From:" field of the email you send, in the form "Your name <E-mail address>". Similarly, when you create an address book entry for someone that includes both name and email address, your email program will frequently use both in creating the "To:" line in the same fashion.

It gets confusing at times since some email programs will actually hide the email address, displaying only the name. You might need to double click on the name or perhaps right click on it and choose some option, to see the actual email address associated with the name.

Now, as to why you're seeing addresses of the form:

emailname@somedomain <emailname@somedomain>

Either of two things happened: when configuring their email program, the sender entered their email address in both the "Name" and "E-mail" fields. Alternately, the email program ignored the "Name", if it even has the ability to use it, and substituted the email name instead. Typically it's the former.

One last comment: these days you'll often see a "Name" that is obviously totally unrelated to the email address that goes with it. Or, you'll see email addresses of the form:

someotheremail@someotherdomain <emailname@somedomain>

In other words both the name and email address look like email addresses, and they bare no obvious relationship to each other.

These are almost always the result of spam. As we'll see in an upcoming article, spammers don't bother to use these as intended, and in fact abuse them in order to create confusion.

Related:

• Ask Leo! - Why is there so much spam?

• Ask Leo! - How do I get rid of all this spam?!?!

• Ask Leo! - Someone's sending from my email address! How do I stop them?!

Article 11783 | Posted August 27, 2007