I seem to have found a bug in the SMTP implementation on the iPhone’s Mail.app. When the iPhone sends an email the recipient will actually see two distinct senders, one sender is “Appleseed” and the other is “John” . Both sending addresses will be wrong and un-reply-able. Somehow, during the SMTP conversation, the iPhone is mishandling the from address if the display name contains a comma.
At work we have a naming convention for email addresses as:
"Last, First" <last_first@Domain.EDU>
For example, assume your email account is set up like this:
Name: Appleseed, John
Address: Appleseed_John@Domain.EDU
When the iPhone sends email the recipient will actually see two distinct senders, one sender is "Appleseed" and the other is "John" <appleseed_john@Domain.EDU>
The sending account should of course be: "Appleseed, John" <appleseed_john@Domain.EDU>
I’ve tested this out sending email from the iPhone through various email servers and I’m fairly certain the bug is on the iPhone, as it happens no matter which SMTP server I use. If the email account has a comma in the display name the message will have a corrupt “From:” address, and the recipient will be unable to reply (since the address gets munged in transport).
I’ve also tested this out with other email clients, and they all properly send email from accounts with “Appleseed, John” as the display name.
(posted on the apple forums here)