>>Brilliant Naomi !! I will use this. Sorry I was trying out the ATC() function and was truly happy with that until I tried your remedy.- it's perfect.
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>>k
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>That's what I used as well (AT function). In this particular case you can use AT or ATC without a difference.

Fortunately nowadays it's rare to see the weird-looking mail addresses I remember seeing back in the early 1980s -- addresses that included % and ! along with @ symbols... Typically UUCP mail address used "bang-pathing" where you strung together system names to set up the pathing... When you ran stuff through various gateways between different networks (e.g. UUCP to BITNET), it was common to see truly weird-looking addresses.

Of course today we're now seeing greater instance of names that aren't displayable in typical ASCII, and so now we've got to worry about various character encodings (though fortunately as far as I recall, certain delimiter characters such as @ are unchanged -- just that you're apt to see gibberish-looking stuff to encode characters not displayable in ASCII)... Speaking of different encodings... I recall those early days those occasions when you came across gateway site with erroneous translation tables for ASCII/EBCDIC conversions, so things got ugly for anything but simple alphanumeric (frequently stuff like caret symbols, slashes, square bracket, curly brace were incorrectly translated).