^ and / are allowed charactes in email address

Bug #266178 reported by Reeg
2
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
GNU Mailman
Invalid
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

According RFC 2822 (section 3.4.1 and 3.2.4) the
characters ^ and / are allowed in the localpart of an
email address. But in the file Mailman/Utils.py line
201 they are listed as _badchars.

[http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1100788&group_id=103&atid=100103]

Revision history for this message
Tokio Kikuchi (tkikuchi) wrote :

_badchars in Utils.py is essentially not for dompliance with
the RFC2822. Any printable characters can appear in local
part if you use 'quoted-string' (I vaguely suppose). This is
mainly for security in Mailman and web interface I suppose.
The character '/' was removed from this list in the CVS
after close investigation. Problem was in the cookie which
mailman send to the browser. '^' is a special character for
regular expression and must be very careful in treating
this. Another character which is listed in _badchars and
allowd in RFC2822 is '|' which is used for pipeline commands
and should be treated with care.
Again, '/' will be removed from the next 2.1.6 release.
BTW, I know '/' is used for X.400 gateway but how '^' is
used? I want to assess this priority.

Revision history for this message
Reeg (reeg) wrote :

Till now I had only a problem with the / because in one
company the have adresses like "name/departmant/country@domain".
Thanks for the change in CVS.

Revision history for this message
Barry Warsaw (barry) wrote :

Ideally, we'd allow any RFC 2822 legal address in, but I'd
rather be secure than accept very uncommon corner cases. So
where some characters cause Mailman problems, it's okay to
leave them in _badchars. I think the number of people this
will affect will be exceedingly small.

Revision history for this message
Tokio Kikuchi (tkikuchi) wrote :

Closing because '/' was already fixed in 2.1.6. Others
should be fixed in 3.0 (later).

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