Best way to parse string of email addresses

Question

So i am working with some email header data, and for the to:, from:, cc:, and bcc: fields the email address(es) can be expressed in a number of different ways:

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Answer 1

The clean and short solution is to use MailAddressCollection:

var collection = new MailAddressCollection();
collection.Add(addresses);

This approach parses a list of addresses separated with colon ,, and validates it according to RFC. It throws FormatException in case the addresses are invalid. As suggested in other posts, if you need to deal with invalid addresses, you have to pre-process or parse the value by yourself, otherwise recommending to use what .NET offers without using reflection.

Sample:

var collection = new MailAddressCollection();
collection.Add("Joe Doe , postmaster@example.com");

foreach (var addr in collection)
{
  // addr.DisplayName, addr.User, addr.Host
}