Hello people,

I want to report an issue in Mailman core that drives a bug in the Mailman REST API. I was testing Postorius's *mass subscribe* feature. When an email address associated with an already existing member is used for subscription, the REST API returns a 409 code saying Member already subscribed which is good. But, when we use the same email with some letters in different cases, the REST API returns 500' i.e server error occurred which should also return 409`. The Mailman core raises the error *User should have had linked address*, i.e a 500 error code occurs.

The screenshots of the above issue:-

Case-insensitive email usage: http://postimg.org/image/qgl2piepj/ http://postimg.org/image/s5u5xkuev/ Case-sensitive email usage: http://postimg.org/image/okyaecpvb/

As far as I can understand from the mailman docs http://gnu-mailman.readthedocs.org/en/latest/src/mailman/model/docs/addresse... <http://gnu-mailman.readthedocs.org/en/latest/src/mailman/model/docs/addresse...> mailman keeps all email addresses in small cases internally.

I tested this again using CURL and REST clients and found that the REST API is failing to return `409' in the latter case. That is, something is wrong with mailman core. Later, I dug in the Mailman core and found out the following things:

1. In /src/mailman/app/membership.py add_member function uses *user = user_manager.get_user(email) *to check if the user corresponding the email address already exists or not. Here email is in *preserved case *and it returns the user associated with this email address. Here it does not matter if the email is in *lower case *itself.

2. Later on, in the same function the following code checks if the email is matched:

*for address in user.addresses:*

•        if address.email == email:*

•               break*

Here *email* is in *preserved case* while *address.email *returns a lower case version of email and an *unmatch* occurs. ( sam@gmail.com and SAM@gmail.com do not matches ofcourse ) But, the thing confuses me is the *assertion error* in case of an unmatch, *User should have had linked address.* What does it signify, as you are using the same email to get the user object and later on matching should be done by bringing the *passed *email in the *lower case *too, i.e ( SAW@gmail.com should be brought down to sam@gmail.com )

*for address in user.addresses:*

•        if address.email == email.lower():*

•               break*

It also makes the REST API return 409 in both cases and it should return it too. I have filed a bug ( Bug #1425359 ) for this.

I may be interpreting things wrong. In case if it is an architectural aspect related to Mailman core, please explain. In case it is a bug in real, I would love to submit a patch for it.

Thanks, Ankush Sharma github.com/black-perl