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Re: case sensitivity

1998-11-06 22:14:24
Liviu Daia <daia(_at_)stoilow(_dot_)imar(_dot_)ro> writes:
On 6 November 1998, Christopher Lindsey 
<lindsey(_at_)ncsa(_dot_)uiuc(_dot_)edu> wrote:
You mean ignore case sensitivity in the username?  If you're using
sendmail, aliases are already case insensitive.  Usernames are
controlled via the F=u flag (if set, convert everything to lowercase
(thus making it case insensitive)).

   If this is true, then it's a bug in sendmail.  The username part in
e-mail addresses _is_ case sensitive (as opposed to the machine name
part, which isn't) --- usernames on Unix are case sensitive.

With enough effort, you _can_ get sendmail to treat local username in a
case sensitive fashion (you not only have to put the 'u' flag on the
local mailer, but also tweak the alias file definitions to not
lowercase everything).  The case of the localpart of _remote_ addresses
preserved (though I suppose you _could_ break this in your sendmail.cf
if you were completely stupid).

I'll note that there are at least a handful of truly buggy programs
which fail to preserve case, including one version of listproc which
*uppercases* every address (!?!?!), such that not preserving case may
be considered an interoperability feature.  It's also my memory that
rfc822 says that the localpart can be interpreted by the destination
system however it wants, so it's technically legal to downcase all
local addresses, though sites which have users with uppercase names
would of course want to disable it.

I do agree that it's rather stupid that we have to do this.


Philip Guenther

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