vCenter email notification has a semicolon/SMTP does not recognize it as a valid email address

Messages from vCenter alarm notification to the SMTP relay has this header info:

Received: (from root@localhost)
    by (8.14.3/8.14.3/Submit) id u92F2su5032029;
    Sun, 2 Oct 2016 15:02:54 GMT
Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2016 15:02:54 GMT
Message-Id: <201610021502.u92F2su5032029@vCenter.firstriskadvisors.com>
To: alert@example.com;
From: vCenter@example.com

The To address has a semicolon and Windows SMTP relay does not recognize it as a valid email address:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

       alert@example.com;

How do I fix this? Any thoughts?

John

Posted 2016-10-02T18:45:14.640

Reputation: 1

Has it ever worked? – Ramhound – 2016-10-02T18:58:48.020

space and "(),:;<>@[] characters are allowed with restrictions (they are only allowed inside a quoted string, as described in the paragraph below, and in addition, a backslash or double-quote must be preceded by a backslash);

So you'd need to quote the semicolon. It's not valid otherwise (and not recommended I'd expect) – djsmiley2k TMW – 2016-10-12T09:38:37.530

Answers

Try using a comma for separating the to addresses you are sending the email to. Semicolons dont always work.

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2131179

Symptoms

An alarm configured to send an email notification to multiple recipients is triggered. The email recipients are do not received the alarm notification. When one recipient is configured, the alarm notification is received.

Cause

This issue occurs when a semi-colon is used to separate each email recipient. The VMware vSphere Client user interface will display each recipient value separated by a semi-colon. In the VMware vSphere Web Client, each recipient will be separated by a comma.

Resolution

When configuring email notifications for VMware vCenter Server alarms, each recipient address must be separated by a comma. Using any other delimiter may cause the notification email to fail.

Chris Parenteau

Posted 2016-10-02T18:45:14.640

Reputation: 51

It's not valid.

You can only have semicolons in the name part of the email address (before the @) and even then it must be within a quoted string. (Wikipedia)

Also it's not generally recommended.

From the headers, it looks like someone copied the address from outlook (or something else that seperates addresses with ;) and accidently included it in the config for vSphere.

Find where this is configured, and remove the ; from the end of the address.

djsmiley2k TMW

Posted 2016-10-02T18:45:14.640

Reputation: 5 937