Re: mail-extract-address-components doesn't handle MIME-encoded full name

[Kevin Rodgers]

> > mail-extract-address-components should either return the MIME-encoded 
> > full name so the caller can decode it
> >
> >     ("=?iso-8859-1?q?Laurent=20Laporte?=" "laurentlaporte@yahoo.com")

> > or decode it itself
> >
> >     ("Laurent Laporte" "laurentlaporte@yahoo.com")
>
> Or perhaps the caller should decode the From: header contents first; 

Apparently not (see attached message).


--
<a href="mailto:&lt;kevin.rodgers&#64;ihs.com&gt;";>Kevin Rodgers</a>

>From - Fri May  9 10:45:07 2003
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
Path: 
uni-berlin.de!fu-berlin.de!news.maxwell.syr.edu!sn-xit-03!sn-xit-06!sn-post-01!supernews.com!corp.supernews.com!gohan12.FreeBSD.org!not-for-mail
From: kyle_jones@wonderworks.com (Kyle Jones)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.vm.info
Subject: Re: mail-extract-address-components doesn't handle MIME-encoded full 
names
Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 02:21:24 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Unknown
Message-ID: <b9f3b4$de5$1@carbon.wonderworks.com>
Sender: kyle@carbon.wonderworks.com
References: <3EBAD6A4.8030307@yahoo.com>
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        Nbf6v4g>!&,7R4Ot4Wg{&tm=WX7P["9%a)_da48-^tGy
        ,qz]Z,Zz\{E.,]'EO+F)@$KtF&V
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Xref: uni-berlin.de gnu.emacs.vm.info:15919

Kevin Rodgers  <ihs_4664@yahoo.com> wrote:
 > After I submitted a report to gnu.emacs.bug with the same subject, I
 > realized that it's probably better for VM to to decode the From: header
 > contents before calling mail-extract-address-components.

RFC 2047 advises against this because RFC 822 parsing rules are
no longer applicable to headers containing the decoded text.  If
mail-extract-address-components expects RFC 822 syntax (and I
think it does), then it could be broken by direct exposure to
decoded text.  The paragraph in the RFC 2046 I'm referring to is:

   NOTE: Decoding and display of encoded-words occurs *after* a
   structured field body is parsed into tokens.  It is therefore
   possible to hide 'special' characters in encoded-words which, when
   displayed, will be indistinguishable from 'special' characters in the
   surrounding text.  For this and other reasons, it is NOT generally
   possible to translate a message header containing 'encoded-word's to
   an unencoded form which can be parsed by an RFC 822 mail reader.

This is just for your information.  In practice the worse thing
that will happen is that someday mail-extract-address-components
might throw an error unexpectedly.

-- 
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