[Mailman-Users] slashes in e-mail addresses

[Richard Barrett]

At 21:09 29/06/2003, Paul H Byerly wrote:
>       I have someone with a couple of slashes in their e-mail address 
> trying to join a list.  Apparently this is non-standard but "allowed" by 
> some systems - with Mailman not being one of them.

I would disagree that this is non-standard. My reading of section 3.2.5 of 
RFC 2822 says that a quoted string form of the local-part can contain a 
slash character (amongst others) so that "fred/smith/jnr"@some.domain 
should be valid if not that usual. It is not as if the form is an obsolete one.

The address parsing by the functions in the email package handle an email 
address of the form "fred/smith/jnr"@some.domain without apparent problem.

The refusal to accept it is caused by the function 
Mailman.Utils.ValidateEmail()

An experienced colleague admits that such an address is valid according to 
the RFC but suggests I would have to be barking to assume that the whole 
range of mail handling agents can be relied on to handle such an address 
reliably.

Maybe some wiser head can confirm how the function 
Mailman.Utils.ValidateEmail()'s extra validation rules were arrived at and 
if rejecting some RFC compliant addresses is justified?

>I found an almost year old discussion in the archives about writing a 
>patch for this, but no follow up.  Anyone?
>
>
><>< Paul   "-rw-rw-rw-" ... file permissions of the beast.
>

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Richard Barrett                                      http://www.openinfo.co.uk