Subject: re: case sensitive address matching

From: Philip Hazel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 11:46:35 +0100 (BST)

Is this a known bug in Pine 3.05?

I sent myself two messages from another system. The only difference was
that in one I used upper case for the mail address and in the other I used
lower case. Pine behaved differently when I tried to reply to each of
these messages.

For the one with the lower case address, all was as expected; I did not
get a "reply to all recipients" message - correct, as there was only one
recipient.

For the one with the upper case address, first of all I did get a "reply
to all recipients" prompt, and when I replied Y to this one, Pine set up
the message with a SINGLE recipient, which was the upper case original
recipient address. The sender's address had got lost. The message in
question was this:

>From metcalfe.csi.cam.ac.uk!ph10 Mon Apr 26 11:42:50 1993
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 93 11:42:31 BST
From: [email-masked] (Phil Hazel)
To: [email-masked]
Subject: test 2
Status: RO

test 2

I started on this investigation as I thought I had been getting unexpected 
prompts when replying to certain messages. Looks as if Pine isn't folding 
the case of the the address correctly.

Philip

--
Philip Hazel                   University Computing Service,
[email-masked]             New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
[email-masked]          England.  Phone: +44 223 334714

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From: Sheryl Erez <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 09:06:19 -0700 (PDT)

This is a known bug in 3.05 and 3.07.  There are plans to fix it in
future releases.  Right now, when Pine compares addresses, it will
think that 'PH10' and 'ph10' are different people.

                       Sheryl Erez
                         [email-masked]
                           UW Network Information Center

On Mon, 26 Apr 1993 11:46:35 +0100 (BST), Philip Hazel wrote:

> Subject:
> To: maillist Pine <[email-masked]>
>

---

From: Dan Schlitt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 14:13:43 -0400 (EDT)

Are you certain that you want to "fix" this?  My memory is that only the
host part of an address is case insensitive.  Officially the local part
of the address is to be interpreted by the addressed host as it
determines.  The only limitation is in the characters that are allowed.

Accepting an address that has the local part in the "wrong" case is the
right thing to do -- be liberal in what you accept.  But making an
assumption about what the sending host intended when you generate the
return address may not be the right thing.

At this time it isn't safe to use case sensitive local parts.  But until
the Internet standard gets changed to require that the whold address and
not just the host part in case insensitive it might be better to retain
the case of characters in the local part of the address.  You never know
when someone is going to start taking the RFC seriously.

My suggestion is that the sending host knows what it wants so preserve the
case when constructing the reply address.  Don't modify headers to suit
your prejudices.  Deal with the case problem when making comparisons in
your program.  Decide what to do with the mail using the results of the
comparison but don't alter the data.

Dan Schlitt                           School of Engineering Computer Systems
[email-masked]        City College of New York
(212)650-6760                         New York, NY 10031

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From: Philip Hazel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1993 09:21:06 +0100 (BST)

> return address may not be the right thing.

That's all very well, but Pine currently does the wrong thing. I received a 
message addressed to [email-masked] from someone@somewhere. When I 
pressed "R" to reply, I got prompted "reply to all recipients", and when I 
pressed "Y", the reply message got set up addressed to [email-masked] 
and NOT to the original sender at all. Whatever you think about case
handling, this behaviour is definitely WRONG!

> comparison but don't alter the data.

I don't follow this. It was the case of MY address that was causing the 
problem, not the case of the sender's address. My address should not have 
appeared in the reply addresses at all.