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Re: Last Call: draft-klensin-rfc2821bis (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to Draft Standard

2007-12-30 15:25:23

Alexey Melnikov wrote:

RFC 821 allowed for space characters (0x20) in local part of
email addresses, but RFC 2821 and 2821bis don't allow for that

| <quoted-string> ::=  """ <qtext> """
| <qtext> ::=  "\" <x> | "\" <x> <qtext> | <q> | <q> <qtext>
[...]

| <q> ::= any one of the 128 ASCII characters except <CR>, <LF>, quote ("),|    
     or backslash (\)
That allowed NO-WS-CTL, SP, and NUL in a <quoted-string> *outside* of a 
<quoted-pair> 

   Local-part     = Dot-string / Quoted-string
                  ; MAY be case-sensitive

   Dot-string     = Atom *("."  Atom)

   Atom           = 1*atext

   Quoted-string  = DQUOTE *qcontent DQUOTE

where qcontent is defined in RFC 2822 as:

   qtext           =       NO-WS-CTL /     ; Non white space controls
                        %d33 /          ; The rest of the US-ASCII
                        %d35-91 /       ;  characters not including "\"
                        %d93-126        ;  or the quote character

   qcontent        =       qtext / quoted-pair

   NO-WS-CTL       =       %d1-8 /         ; US-ASCII control characters
                        %d11 /          ;  that do not include the
                        %d12 /          ;  carriage return, line feed,
                        %d14-31 /       ;  and white space characters
                        %d127

Was this change between RFC 821 and RFC 2821 intentional? Prohibition of 
spaces in quoted parts breaks gatewaying to/from X.400 (MIXER, RFC 2156).

Regards,
Alexey



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