I think hotmail, or was it some other mail mogul, is allowing their users to have those weird German umlauts and some accented characters. EXAMPLE: umlaut-ä.accent-á@example.com We are living in a multilingual world with dozens of alphabets. Especiall those doing government sites should consider accessibility a must. I would not enjoy getting sued by some one who feels discriminated, because of denied access since his/her name contains "abnormal" characters. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php