Date: Wed, 02 Sep 2015 22:54:17 -0400
From: Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com>
Message-ID:
<20150903025418(_dot_)3961818216(_at_)pb-smtp0(_dot_)pobox(_dot_)com>
| We reject those addresses in the nmh address parser as invalid (what
| you're seeing in repl is really just the result of failed address
| parsing,
Sure, but ...
| but that can occur in other situations).
Aside from when it would be used to generate an address, which without
modifying them by adding quotes (or otherwise, perhaps by just dropping the
phrase completely) would be improper, what are those other situations?
I haven't been able to find anything that doesn't work exactly as I would
expect it to -- the one I thought most likely to fail, if anything was
going to, was "pick -from" - but that worked just fine too.
[I admit though I'm a procmail user, so I don't use nmh's filter command,
whose name I don't even remember, so I didn't test that one...]
| Addresses with unquoted '.' are valid in the RFC 5322 grammar as an
| obs-phrase, so they are not bogus under the letter of the rules.
They're obsolete, and you're not intended to ever see one - or that was
the hope, by now ... at the time (really, at the time of 2822, when all
the obs-xxx rules were invented, rather than for 5322 which touched little
of this) it was understood that there were lots of broken mailers that
generated all kind of stuff, and also that some of what had been technically
legal, was now obsoleted - very little of that was ever actually used or seen
though - if it was legal, and actually used, very little was obsoleted .. the
one example I can recall was the <@domain,@domain:user@domain> type syntax,
which was dropped, because it was ugly, and because about half the
implementations got it wrong, one way or another. Anyway, it was left in
because no-one would want mailers that refused to handle (as in outright
rejected, or dumped core, or similar) messages using that stuff.
But that was a long time ago now (approaching 20 years) - one would have
hoped that with the more precise spec in 2822 (and 5322) that by now mailers
would have been largely cleaned up.
| Bottom line, we get this wrong.
If you can't find me an example, which doesn't involve sending to it,
where the addresses are improperly handled, then I will respectfully disagree.
Of course, should nmh be improved to be able to make a correctly formed
address when presented with obsolete (or for that matter, any other incorrect
forms) and produce a correctly formed (and the wanted) address to use in
replies, etc, then I am not going to object.
I just don't consider this to be a very high priority task. If I occasionally
get a message to reply to with an address that fails, I just correct it
manually. Fortunately for me that is very rare (so rare I don't recall the
last time it happened.) If that ever became a regular enough occurrence that
it started annoying me, I'd just make a script that would correct the bad
form for me (and at the same time, do my best to get the problem fixed at the
sender's end.)
kre
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