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On Tuesday, August 11 at 09:34 PM, quoth Patrick Gen Paul:
> Is there a well-respected mail etiquette, or RFC even, that I could
> refer him to?
Ah! Why did you say so? I thought you were trying to decide whether or
not mutt was misbehaving (I wonder what Thunderbird does with this
fellow's email).
You may find RFC 822 useful. The relevant header definition is this
one:
authentic = "From" ":" mailbox ; Single author
/ ( "Sender" ":" mailbox ; Actual submittor
"From" ":" 1#mailbox) ; Multiple Authors
He's using the first option, which means his email address MUST
conform to the "mailbox" description, which is as follows:
mailbox = addr-spec ; simple address
/ phrase route-addr ; name & addr-spec
He's chosen the latter form. His name eats up the "phrase" portion, so
his email address must conform to a route-addr, defined thusly:
route-addr = "<" [route] addr-spec ">"
Since he's not including a route, the thing within the wockas (<>)
MUST conform to the addr-spec definition, which is:
addr-spec = local-part "@" domain
The objectionable part of his address is the "local-part", which is
required to be formed like so:
local-part = word *("." word)
His "local-part" is composed of two words, separated by a period. The
FIRST word, though, is broken. A word is:
word = atom / quoted-string
The quoted-string definition doesn't apply here (since he isn't using
quotes), and an "atom" is defined as:
atom = 1*<any CHAR except specials, SPACE and CTLs>
"specials", as you'll note in section 3.3 of RFC 822 are:
specials = "(" / ")" / "<" / ">" / "@" ; Must be in quoted-
/ "," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <"> ; string, to use
/ "." / "[" / "]" ; within a word.
In other words, he's using a colon in an atom, which is explicitly
forbidden by the definition of email.
Is that sufficiently explicit for you? :)
(And, in case you get into an argument with him, addr-spec has not
changed, even with more recent less-standardized RFCs)
I'm surprised that his email isn't instantly classified as spam.
Usually it's just spammers that violate basic well-recognized rules
like that, and it's fairly common to blacklist emails that are
fundamentally malformed or disobey basic rules like that---especially
in an age when it's equally common to see software come out with
updates warning "security fix! malformed input caused cancer in users;
who would have thought a stray colon would cause that kind of trouble!
Oh the humanity, how were we poor developers to know that not everyone
was trustworthy?!?" (or something similar).
> I'm giving him another 24 hours before I killfile him for good.
Good luck with that.
~Kyle
- --
I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the
less we use our power the greater it will be.
-- Thomas Jefferson
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