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Re: [Nmh-workers] repl doesn't like return address

2015-09-01 05:41:02
Hi Kevin,

I only run into this with one person running an MSN.com account.  I'm
certain that I won't be able to get him to change his human readable
"real name" part.  I'm even more certain that I won't be able to get
MSN.com to adhere to the standard.

If you haven't already, I've lost track, you may want to look at his
email headers and see if it's actually coming out of MSN's machines as
opposed to him sending it from elsewhere with his MSN address in the
From header.  If it is, you could try prodding MSN with a detailed
complaint;  a contact address is hard to find, but there's 
abuse(_at_)msn(_dot_)com
that probably has a human at the other end.
http://abuse.net/lookup.phtml?domain=msn.com

At least I have it confirmed that the real names containing dots
(perhaps other characters too?) are not adhering to the standard(s).

I think it's more complex than that?  David pointed us at
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322 and that says

    name-addr     =  [display-name] angle-addr
    display-name  =  phrase
    phrase        =  1*word / obs-phrase
    obs-phrase    =  word *(word / "." / CFWS)
    word          =  atom / quoted-string
    atom          =  [CFWS] 1*atext [CFWS]
    atext         =  # One of A-Z, a-z, 0-9, or "!#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~".

Given atext doesn't include a `.', the one or more words that make up
phrase can't be `Dr. Seuss', or `foo.bar'.  But they are allowed by
obs-phrase as long as they're not at the beginning.  So those two
examples are both parsed as obs-phrase with `.' being the middle token.

`obs' means `obsolete', and is explained in section 4.  It's mostly to
cover old syntax that's no longer welcome;  it MUST be accepted as I may
have old emails or old software that follows earlier RFCs, but it MUST
NOT be generated any more.  However, obs-phrase is a special special
case!  No earlier RFC allowed it, but it was out there and had to be
handled by this RFC.

Ken, what's the parsing difficulty?   4.1 hints at it.  Does nmh have
extra difficulty because it takes email address without a `@' and domain
part?  I'm struggling to come up with examples, perhaps because I'm
allowing too much look ahead, e.g. `a b c d e . f' takes a few atoms
before you know if it's a phrase or an obs-phrase.

Cheers, Ralph.

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