Ruby: net/smtp weirdness - to address can't contain dash/hyphen (-)

This caused me a lot of grief and debugging time.

I am using code like this to send emails from a CGI script:

    Net::SMTP.start('smtp.example.com', 25) do |smtp|
      smtp.open_message_stream('from@example.com', ['dest-address@example.com']) do |f|
        f.puts 'From: from@example.com'
        f.puts 'To: dest-address@example.com'
        f.puts 'Cc: cc-address@example.com'
        f.puts 'Subject: test message'
        f.puts
        f.puts 'This is a test message.'
      end
    end

and this is failing silent in my case.

I have discovered through trial and error that if I remove the -(dash) from the to address it works. Dashes in from or CC addresses does not matter.