[Mailman-Users] German umlaut in From-line using outlook exchangewith closed lists

Mark Sapiro mark at msapiro.net
Tue Jan 11 19:54:01 CET 2011


Werner Spirk wrote:

>
>Mails sent from outlook exchange will not be sent to a closed list
>when there is a German umlaut within the name like
>
>From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Mai=2C_G=FCnter?= <Guenter.Mai at lrz.de>
>
>in general:
>
>Mail sent
>From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Surname=2C_Givenname?= <ADDRESS at lrz.de>
>
>causes an undeliverable message by mailman sent to
>surname at mailman.lrz-muenchen.de, if the list in a closed list:


It is not the umlaut that causes the problem. It is the comma.


>Outlook Exchange goes conform with RFC 2047 .


You are correct, but this is tricky. The intent of RFC 2047 section 5,
rule 3 is that an encoded word such as
=?iso-8859-1?Q?Mai=2C_G=FCnter?= when used as the real name portion of
an address will not contain any of the characters which are not
allowed unquoted in this context, and this is true of that encoded
word.

However, Mailman looks at the From: header, and because of the way it
processes this, it sees an ascii decoded header value which looks like
'Mai, G?nter <Guenter.Mai at lrz.de>'. It then parses this and gets two
email addresses, 'mai' and 'guenter.mai at lrz.de' because of the
unquoted comma.

For some purposes, such as determining whether a post is from a list
member, Mailman considers all the addresses and will determine that
this  is from a list member if 'guenter.mai at lrz.de' is a member, but
if the post is held for some reason such as 'guenter.mai at lrz.de' is
moderated, the notice to the user will be sent to only the first
address 'mai' which is invalid.

So, yes, you are correct that Mailman is not doing the right thing here.

I've developed a patch that I think will fix this without any other
side effects. I've attached that as rfc2047.patch.txt. Please try this
patch and see if it solves your problems.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan

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