Bugs item #1363422, was opened at 2005-11-22 06:26 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by m-a You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=100103&aid=1363422&group_id=103 Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: (un)subscribing Group: 2.1 (stable) Status: Open Resolution: None Priority: 7 Submitted By: Tim Wilde (krellis) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: Valid E-mails Rejected as Invalid Initial Comment: I ran into a problem recently with sync_members. I was attempting to add a list of addresses that included "---tim---@krellis.org", but this address was rejected: bin/sync_members -a=no -f /usr/local/mailinglists/lists/system-status.txt system-status Invalid : ---tim---@krellis.org You must fix the preceding invalid addresses first. While this is an ODD address, it is perfectly legal, per section 3.4 of RFC 2822 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html). Rejecting a valid address like this seems like a pretty major problem to me. This was with MailMan 2.1.6 on FreeBSD 4. If there is any more information I can provide, please let me know. Regards, Tim Wilde ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Matthias Andree (m-a) Date: 2006-02-01 10:29 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=2788 Mailman is not alone in rejecting messages that start with a "-" - some MTAs also do that, for instance, Postfix (but see Postfix's "allow_min_user" option). The reason is that too many sites mistake such addresses for sendmail command-line options, because most sendmail users are clueless and forget the "--" before the addresses. For that reason, it is rather unwise to use mail addresses that start with a "-" - while legal, it's not universally accepted. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Tim Wilde (krellis) Date: 2005-12-06 00:57 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=1021966 This appears to be a problem with line 210 of Utils.py, in the ValidateEmail function: if _badchars.search(s) or s[0] == '-': raise Errors.MMHostileAddress, s MailMan is explicitly rejecting e-mails that start with a hyphen. Why? This is a perfectly legal e-mail address. If MailMan is using e-mail addresses in such an unsafe way that they could be interpreted as command line arguments, that's just absurd. I can't see any other reason to forbid a leading hyphen, though. Can anyone tell me if I will be safe removing this check, or if MailMan will blow up elsewhere? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=100103&aid=1363422&group_id=103