Debugging strangeness in To: field

[Mark Anderson]

On Wed, 6 Apr 2011 14:10:51 -0500, Aaron Williamson <aaron at copiesofcopies.org> wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> On 04/06/2011 02:58 PM, Mark Anderson wrote:
> > Do you have any hints about how I could figure out why gmime doesn't
> > like this To: list?
> > 
> > To: One Big Happy <OneBigHappy at amd.com>, dist.Happy Group
> > 	<dist.HappyGroup at amd.com>
> 
> I may be way off, but I wonder if it's seeing "dist.Happy" and confusing it for
> an email address (or at least a domain) rather than the display name for the
> email address.  Maybe display names of the form xxx.yyy need quotes?

Hi Aaron,

Hmmmm, if that's the case, then perhaps I need to process my headers to
"fix" Exchange email addresses with display names containing '.'

I'm fairly certain that Exchange "display names" for internal email
lists is the source, since instrumenting my notmuch, I see other
instances of the same craziness with incompletely indexed "To:" lists.

Arg, I'm reading RFC #822, and it seems pretty clear that originally
this would not be allowed.  '.' is a special character and wouldn't have
been allowed unquoted in the display name.

I could hope that some leeway has been added in more recent RFC's, but
with MSoft's traditional implement first, specs later methodology, it
seems unlikely.

What a bother.

It is rather painful that I can have a lot of recipients dropped
silently by gmime.

Thanks,
-Mark

> 
> Best,
> Aaron
>