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11 messages in net.sourceforge.lists.courier-usersRe: [courier-users] how to make email...| From | Sent On | Attachments |
|---|---|---|
| Kiran Kumar Vangaveti | Feb 18, 2003 10:39 am | |
| Patrick O'Reilly | Feb 18, 2003 11:26 am | |
| Bill Michell | Feb 18, 2003 11:27 am | |
| John Rudd | Feb 18, 2003 11:41 am | |
| Jeff Potter | Feb 18, 2003 12:02 pm | |
| Bowie Bailey | Feb 18, 2003 12:07 pm | |
| Bill Michell | Feb 18, 2003 12:13 pm | |
| Dave Greene | Feb 18, 2003 2:37 pm | |
| Patrick O'Reilly | Feb 18, 2003 10:06 pm | |
| John Rudd | Feb 18, 2003 11:38 pm | |
| Patrick O'Reilly | Feb 19, 2003 9:43 am |
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| Subject: | Re: [courier-users] how to make email addresses case insensitive | Actions... |
|---|---|---|
| From: | John Rudd (jru...@ucsc.edu) | |
| Date: | Feb 18, 2003 11:38:46 pm | |
| List: | net.sourceforge.lists.courier-users | |
On Tuesday, Feb 18, 2003, at 22:05 US/Pacific, Patrick O'Reilly wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Rudd" <jru...@ucsc.edu>
From: "Patrick O'Reilly" <cour...@perimeter.co.za>
read about 'locallowercase' in the courier man page.
From: "Kiran Kumar Vangaveti" <kku...@arisglobal.com>
Does any one have an idea howto make the email addresses case insensitive.
So, by default, courier is not RFC compliant? (in that the RFC's for email addresses specify that email addresses are always case insensitive?)
Careful! Sam is very pedantic about RFC compliance - and so he should be!
[snip RFC822 quote]
According to RFC822 the local-part "requires preservation of case information", with the reserved account "postmaster" being specifically excluded from that requirement.
Except that RFC822 is NOT about mail delivery (resolving an address to a mailbox), it's about the format of the mail message itself. In contrast, RFC 2821 (SMTP) says in section "4.1.2 Command Argument Syntax":
"Local-part = Dot-string / Quoted-string ; MAY be case-sensitive"
"While the above definition for Local-part is relatively permissive, for maximum interoperability, a host that expects to receive mail SHOULD avoid defining mailboxes where [...] the Local-part is case-sensitive."
IE. "don't make the local part case sensitive, you may, but you should avoid it". SMTP _is_ about how addresses are resolved to mailboxes. RFC822 is not. The part of RFC822 that you quoted is saying that "when copying the message from one machine to another, preserve the printed case of the local part". It never says "when resolving that address to a mailbox, take the case of the local part into consideration". And, RFC 2821 specifically says you should avoid doing that exact thing.
(NOTE: 2821 _does_ re-iterate that the case of the local part must be preserved in transmission, it just also says you should avoid using that case information in resolving the address to a mailbox)
If an admin decides to ignor that withn his domain, that's is his choice. The fact that it has become the de-facto standard does not make it part of the RFC.
It's the de-facto standard because it's what is recommended by the relevant RFC.
(though, that may be the tail wagging the dog a little; RFC 821 is more ambiguous about how delivery/resolution is handled, but does also say that the case sensitivity of the local-part text must be preserved in case it's important to the receiving machine (basically the same as what I said up there: don't alter it in transmission) ... so it may be that "821 was ambiguous, the de-facto standard assumed insensitivity, and so that became part of the protocol revision in 2821". But, currently, avoiding case-sensitivity is what is in the RFC.)
AND ... what I've described as standard behavior is exactly what the "de-facto standard" does -- sendmail, by default, preserves the printed case of the local part, but does not take the case information into account when delivering the message to a specific mailbox.
And Sam allows us to implement the non-standard behavious if we so choose.
I think that would be true if it was "defaults to case insensitive and allows you to change that to the non-standard behavior of being case sensitive". Instead, he's doing the opposite.
(note: I'm not trying to flame anyone; my initial query wasn't bait, it was a request for clarification)