[Mailman-Users] Spaces in Email Addresses (the nightmare continues)

[John Price]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 12:11:31AM +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 3:53 PM -0500 2004-08-23, John Price wrote:
> 
> > Actually, according to RFC822 (section 3.4.1), spaces are
> > allowed in email addresses:
> 
> 	RFC 822 has been superceded for quite some time.  See 
> <http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt> instead.  The wording is 
> more difficult for me to read, but from what I've been able to gather 
> so far, the use of space characters is no longer allowed.

I've been studying RFC2822, and it's even nastier than I
originally thought. :(

Basically, the local part of an email address is called
the "local-part" (sec 3.4.1).  The local-part can be one
of three things: dot-atom, quoted-string, or
obs-local-part.

A quoted-string is defined as optional white-space, a
quote, zero or more combinations of white space and qtext
or a quoted pair(s), and finally a quote and optionally
more white space (although there is a note that RFC2822
does not allow white space between the local part and the
'@' character). (sec 3.2.5)

qtext is defined as ASCII characters 33, 35-91, 93-126
(not space, '@' or '\'). (sec 3.2.5) A quoted-pair is a
backslash ('\') followed by any of these ASCII characters:
1-9, 11-12, 14-127 (all characters excluding NULL, CR and
LF). (sec 3.2.2)

This means you can have spaces in email addresses.
Control characters are also allowed (except NULL, CR & LF)
if they are escaped by a backslash.

If the local-part is a quoted-string, it can also span
multiple lines in the headers! So for example, this is
legal:

From: "some really long
 crazy address"@domain.com
Subject: Check out the email address my idiot sys admin gave me!

The From address should be converted to an actual email
address that looks like this internally:

some really long crazy address at domain.com

I can see some idiot sys admin now dreaming of a way to
assign someone an email address that has a bunch of
backspace characters in it...  But how the hell do you
type that into a web form or your email program?  If they
really wanted that ability, why wouldn't they escape them
like C does, i.e. "\x08" for a backspace.

If they were going to obsolete RFC822, why would they
leave all this in there???  Who needs control characters
in any email, period?

Pounding head on desk,
John

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