[Mailman-Users] Periods in user email addresses rejected

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jay Deiman writes:

 > I just got mailman up and running with Postfix and everything has been 
 > working perfectly except when someone tries to subscribe to the list 
 > that has a period in the "user" portion of the address.  For example: 
 > fname.lname at domain.org.  It gets rejected as an invalid email address by 
 > the web interface.

I've never heard of this before.  Just checking, but are you sure that
these mailboxes don't have periods in their display names rather than
(or as well as) their addresses?  That is, although

    Stephen Turnbull <stephen.turnbull at invalid.com>

is a valid mailbox according to RFC 2822,

    Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen.turnbull at invalid.com>

is not, and must be quoted

    "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen.turnbull at invalid.com>

(I don't think Mailman checks for this, but given that AFAICT from the
source, Mailman should not behave the way you describe, it's a guess.)

 > First, is this a setting somewhere that can be changed?

No.  I would assume that the design is to allow anything that RFC 2822
does.  As far as I can tell, what you are seeing is a MMHostileAddress
as defined in Mailman/Errors.py, and the characters checked for are in
_badchars and _specials in Mailman/Utils.py.  However, '.' isn't in
there AFAICS, in a recently updated bzr checkout of 2.1.

What version of Mailman are you using?