{"id":44883,"date":"2015-01-19T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-19T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2015\/01\/19\/why-does-outlook-use-a-semicolon-to-separate-multiple-recipients-by-default\/"},"modified":"2019-03-13T12:12:09","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T19:12:09","slug":"20150119-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20150119-00\/?p=44883","title":{"rendered":"Why does Outlook use a semicolon to separate multiple recipients by default?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft Outlook by default uses a semicolon to separate multiple recipients. <a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.extendoffice.com\/documents\/outlook\/1649-outlook-allow-comma-as-address-separator.html\">You can change this to a comma<\/a>, but why is the semicolon the default? <\/p>\n<p>Microsoft Outlook was originally positioned as a business product, and many businesses complained that the use of a comma as a separator created havoc because they have a policy of setting names in the address book as &#8220;Last, First&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>In 2000, the Outlook folks tried to change the default, but the outcry from corporations made them go back to having the semicolon be the default separator. <\/p>\n<p>Besides, there are a lot of people who have commas in their names, such as <a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.mlkdayofservice.org\/\">Martin Luther King, Jr<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In triplicate, please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-44883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>In triplicate, please.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}