553 malformed address

[Aaron]

I have an application that sends messages out through our Exchange 2000 server. The application puts a semi-colon(;) at the end of the email address to accomodate a situation where mulitple recipients would receive an email. Therefore, the email address gets submitted to the Exchange 2000 server as user@mycompany.com;. The Exchange 2000 server rejects this address and spits back a 553 malformed address error. The only way I can get around this is by putting <> around the address (i.e. <user@mycompany.com>). I believe this cause the Exchange server to not validate the address. However, adding the brackets around the address is not a viable option.

Anyone know why Exchange 2000 is treating the semi-colon as part of the address and not a separator? I do not have this problem with Exchange 5.5.

Thanks!

Aaron