I'll stick to what I'm doing now which is that I replace the at-sign with a dot and take that as a username. Sorry for the newbie question and thanks all for the answers.

Its better to use a dash... a dot is valid in the username part of an email address... so what dot do you split on?

Example

brian.west@domain.com brian@west.domain.com

So which do you split on :) Not very clear is it?

It is not, but I don't need to do that. I don't need to guess the user's e-mail from their SIP name; I put their ID in the directory entry as a call variable: <variable name="user_id" value="4"/> This ID is from the users database where I can access all the info about the user, including her e-mail address. My motivation was making it as simply as possible for the end users to connect to Freeswitch with their SIP phones. Since they already use their e-mails to log in to other systems, it would be consistent to use it as their SIP name, too. You showed me it is not possible, so I'll just tell them the username is their e-mail with @ replaced with a dot. For now that is good enough. (BTW dashes are allowed in the username part of e-mails as well, see atext definition in RFC822) Jan PS: How do I not start a new thread on each reply? I'm getting only the digest e-mail and need to start a new message when I want to reply.