Comment 61 for bug 369150

(In reply to comment #60)
> I don't think decoding is a real problem

This isn't entirely the case. When a From: address has a comma in the MIME-encoded atom, you end up with the part of the address before the comma displayed in the Recipient column, and the second part displayed in the envelope panel. The fact that this problem carries over on Reply is the source of most of the dupes in this bug.

> So parsing is hard and currently we fail in the first example to get that as
> one address. To ease that part, I'd like to put quotes around names that
> contain commas if we know that's just one name. Extracting
> =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Bj=F6rnsen=2C_J=F6rn?= ...
> from a mail is such a situation.

You mean, change the internal representation of the string from MIME-encoded to quoted (and also adding backslash-escaping of quotes and perhaps other special characters within the quoted string), then undoing the same before encoding on send?

I don't see a reason why that wouldn't work, and it would probably be easier to implement. I do wonder if rearchitecting so that you *do* maintain the 2047 atoms internally until display, and until initializing the edit fields in the compose window, might not be more maintainable in the long run.