Usually when adding a web user to the address book of my Domino server I create a Person document and set a unique fullname (field "FullName") in canonical format (for example "CN=John Smith 8/O=Organization"). However, in order to not have to worry about uniqueness and to easily derive a user's mail address directly from his/her fullname, I would like to generate a fullname based on the user's mail address. Here is an example:
Mail address: john_smith.001@my.web-users.com
Derived fullname: CN=john_smith.001/O=my.web-users.com
Unfortunately, I have not found a documentation on what charaters are valid / safe to be used in fullnames, but I would like to know
(A) if all characters that can be used in mail addresses (except for "@", "=" and "/") can also be used in fullnames and
(B) if there could be problems with document access in NotesDocuments whose authors and readers fields contain fullnames with "special" characters.
Notes canonical names follow the X400 standard (only difference is to use a slash instead of a semicolon to separate the parts - allowed in 3.2.1 of the spec). X400 uses RFC1685 for the format. The spec doesn't say anything about characters other than / = and @, so you can use ..
You should (the Notes specs says it somewhere) never use . in a Domain name for a Notes domain (spaces are also a bad idea).
I had the practice to name the common name of my servers after their DNS names: server1.acme.com/OU=ServersNorth/O=Acme - saved me the headache to create connection documents (but freezes Domain names).