Email and allowed charactes Options

[pandy]

Had some problems replying to a group email today. The outgoing server complained about a malformed header in any of several fields and refused to send the email. I suspected the "name" part before one of the email addresses as it looked really fishy, but I removed it and it didn't help, so the error was somewhere else and the problem was solved by copying everything to a new email.

But it got me thinking. What characters are allowed in the "name part"? Any? I quote "name part" because I don't know what it's called. I mean The "Brigitte Bardot" part in the below example.

CODE

"Brigitte Bardot" <bb34@example.com>
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I tried to skim through the RFC but I just got confused.