Re: Bug#684356: carnivore: has multiple id's for same e-mail address
Bart Martens <bartm@debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 05:35:45PM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:
>> | The local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive.
>> (2.4 RFC 5321)
> It seems that Debian doesn't always do that. For example, an e-mail
> sent to BartM@debian.org is delivered to the same mailbox as an e-mail
> sent to bartm@debian.org.
But that's consistent. The local delivery system is allowed to map
addresses to mailboxes however it wants, including mapping all
capitalization patterns to the same mailbox. (That's typical behavior,
even.)
> Also, the script bts-wnpp_rm already converts all e-mail addresses to
> lowercase.
> I think that it is better to accept the reality that most people
> consider e-mail addresses as case insensitive. Looking at the examples
> in carnivore I think that it is better to do the same in carnivore.
The formally correct thing to do is to case-smash "local" addresses (such
as @debian.org addresses) where we know that we are going to treat all
case variations as equivalent, but to preserve case in non-local addresses
where we don't know what the remote behavior will be.
However, I must admit that, other than as demostrations of strict
standards compliance, I've never met a mail system in the real world that
delivered varient capitalizations to different people. I've heard of some
that bounced some capitalizations as an anti-spam measure, but that
doesn't really argue against address merging for a tracking database.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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