On Thu, 20 Jan 2005, Josh Trutwin wrote:
> It looks as if the email addresses are in the Name field in her
> address book (Outhouse client).
Yup, I'm sure Outlook messed with it. I've seen various other munges of
address formats in people's address books too.
>
> I tried finding it in the RFC, but I believe the single quotes around
> the email address are not legal right? My MTA (qmail) is trying to
> send a message to @hotmail.com' - which obviously doesn't exist with
> the single quote at the end.
Yeah, not the friendliest description in the RFC:
...
<mailbox> ::= <local-part> "@" <domain>
<local-part> ::= <dot-string> | <quoted-string>
<dot-string> ::= <string> | <string> "." <dot-string>
<string> ::= <char> | <char> <string>
<quoted-string> ::= """ <qtext> """
<qtext> ::= "\" <x> | "\" <x> <qtext> | <q> | <q> <qtext>
<char> ::= <c> | "\" <x>
...
Further down it mentions that <c> is any of the 1st 128 ASCII characters,
except for the special ones.
The special characters do not include single quote. So I would say that
per RFC <'test'@hotmail.com> is a legal address, but the single quotes
around test are part of the address itself, and not a quoting character.
Of course, with the different ways the standards are implemented, mileage
may vary on how it gets parsed at the other end. Certainly hotmail
wouldn't let you create such an address, so assuming it even accepted it
and parsed it out to local delivery to account 'test' (single-quotes
included)...
I was able to get Sendmail to do it:
echo "Test" | /usr/lib/sendmail "'test'@hotmail.com"
(double quotes added for the shell)
And I got a bounce back from Hotmail indicating that my side actually put
the single quotes in the RCPT TO:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<'test'@hotmail.com>
(reason: 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable)
I setup 'test2' in aliases to point to my account, and:
telnet localhost 25
...
RCPT TO: <'test2'@whee.org>
...
And got in my mailbox:
Received: from localhost (titan [207.195.206.249])
by titan.whee.org (8.12.9/8.12.9) with SMTP id j0KFOm3f006498
for <'test2'@whee.org>; Thu, 20 Jan 2005 09:25:01 -0600 (CST)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
So Sendmail seems to agree with me that it is a valid address, and the
single quotes would be considered part of the mailbox. Allman did good.