but in the particular case of this thread, it sounds like including
the '.' in the middle of a contiguous name isn't a bug, according to
ken, right? or did i mis-read all that?
Weeeellll .... it's all about how strict you want to be.
So, to recap.
- An email address is:
name-addr = [display-name] angle-addr
display-name = phrase
phrase = 1*word / obs-phrase
And, basically, a "word" cannot contain an unquoted '.' (along with
other characters).
But ... obs-phrase is the wrinkle. §4.1 of RFC 5322 has the definitive
answer:
Note: The "period" (or "full stop") character (".") in obs-phrase
is not a form that was allowed in earlier versions of this or any
other specification. Period (nor any other character from
specials) was not allowed in phrase because it introduced a
parsing difficulty distinguishing between phrases and portions of
an addr-spec (see section 4.4). It appears here because the
period character is currently used in many messages in the
display-name portion of addresses, especially for initials in
names, and therefore must be interpreted properly
At the beginning of §4, the RFC says in part (about all of the obsolete
syntax documented later):
Though these syntactic forms MUST NOT be generated according to
the grammar in section 3, they MUST be accepted and parsed by a
conformant receiver.
So ... any MUA that generates an obs-phrase is NOT RFC-compliant, but
any MUA that doesn't interpret it is ALSO not RFC-compliant. So we
can't really complain to others about RFC violations when we're not RFC
compliant.
I took a look at our email parser (it's in sbr/mf.c, and boy, does that
filename seem appropriate now, because that's what I shouted when I was
reading it). I am unclear how it works at all for the trailing '.' case,
but in any event we don't have enough lookahead to determine if a period
is part of a display name or an email address. Fixing that is going to
be ... challenging.
David Levine wrote some code for repl that should fix up these addresses,
at least good enough to make replies work; I don't know why that isn't
working, but I need to investigate that as it would be a good stopgap
fix.
--Ken
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