Case in-sensitive email addresses

Dave Lawrence dkl at redhat.com
Fri Dec 6 20:32:17 UTC 2002


When I send mail to all of my email addresses and twiddle with the case,
they still seem to make it where they are supposed to go so some MTA's
are munging this.

3.4.7.  CASE INDEPENDENCE

        Except as noted, alphabetic strings may be represented in  any
        combination of upper and lower case.  The only syntactic units

     August 13, 1982              - 14 -                      RFC #822

     Standard for ARPA Internet Text Messages

        which requires preservation of case information are:

                    -  text
                    -  qtext
                    -  dtext
                    -  ctext
                    -  quoted-pair
                    -  local-part, except "Postmaster"

        When matching any other syntactic unit, case is to be ignored.
        For  example, the field-names "From", "FROM", "from", and even
        "FroM" are semantically equal and should all be treated ident-
        ically.

        When generating these units, any mix of upper and  lower  case
        alphabetic  characters  may  be  used.  The case shown in this
        specification is suggested for message-creating processes.

        Note:  The reserved local-part address unit, "Postmaster",  is
               an  exception.   When  the  value "Postmaster" is being
               interpreted, it must be  accepted  in  any  mixture  of
               case, including "POSTMASTER", and "postmaster".

So from this I gather that the username portion of the email address should 
treated as case-sensitive and the domain part as in-sensitive.

So I imagine that this should stay the way it is. Closing bugs as WONTFIX.

On Fri, 2002-12-06 at 14:54, timeless wrote:
> Dave Lawrence wrote:
> > We have had some complaints about the way Bugzilla handles login_names
> > in the database through channel partners as well as bug reports.
> > Currently it seems that bugzilla accepts Dkl at Redhat.Com and
> > dkl at redhat.com as 2 separate accounts even though they are both the same
> > real email address. Looking at the CVS code this looks to be the same
> > now also. Should we be lowercasing the email address when a new user is
> > created and then lowercase values before comparing them to the
> > login_name field such as confirm_login? Is there already a bug report
> > for something like this? I was unable to find one at first glance in
> > b.m.o. I think this has been discussed before but not sure what opinions
> > came from it.
> 
> um. that's a no no. email addresses are allowed to be case sensitive.
> 
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