[Mailman-Users] Periods in user email addresses rejected

[Barry Finkel]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
| Jay Deiman writes:
|
|  > I just got mailman up and running with Postfix and everything has been
|  > working perfectly except when someone tries to subscribe to the list
|  > that has a period in the "user" portion of the address.  For example:
|  > fname.lname at domain.org.  It gets rejected as an invalid email
address by
|  > the web interface.
|
| I've never heard of this before.  Just checking, but are you sure that
| these mailboxes don't have periods in their display names rather than
| (or as well as) their addresses?  That is, although
|
|     Stephen Turnbull <stephen.turnbull at invalid.com>
|
| is a valid mailbox according to RFC 2822,
|
|     Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen.turnbull at invalid.com>
|
| is not, and must be quoted
|
|     "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen.turnbull at invalid.com>
|
| (I don't think Mailman checks for this, but given that AFAICT from the
| source, Mailman should not behave the way you describe, it's a guess.)
|
|  > First, is this a setting somewhere that can be changed?
|
| No.  I would assume that the design is to allow anything that RFC 2822
| does.  As far as I can tell, what you are seeing is a MMHostileAddress
| as defined in Mailman/Errors.py, and the characters checked for are in
| _badchars and _specials in Mailman/Utils.py.  However, '.' isn't in
| there AFAICS, in a recently updated bzr checkout of 2.1.
|
| What version of Mailman are you using?
|

And Jay replied:

>I'm using version 2.1.10 (FreeBSD port) with Postfix 2.4.1 (FreeBSD
>port).  I just tried this again through the web interface (not as an
>admin, but as someone attempting to subscribe) and I got the same
>results. I used the address "jay.deiman at gmail.com" (without quotes) and
>no name in the name field.  Verbatim, I get this response:
>
>You must supply a valid email address.
>
>That is it.  I've tested with other email addresses, not containing a
>period, and they all work fine.

I just ran a test on my Mailman 2.1.11 test system (with Postfix),
and I was able, through the web interface, to subscribe

     Barry.Finkel at anl.gov

to one of my test lists.  I did not enter anything in the

     Your name (optional):

box.  I received the confirmation mail at that address, and I went to
the URL in that e-mail to confirm my subscription.  I then had to
approve my subscription, as this test list requires list owner
approval for subscriptions.  Postfix is involved only in sending the
confirmation mail to Barry.Finkel at anl.gov.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994