Re: [EAI] Shepherd report review of mailinglist-02

["Martin J. Dürst" <[e-mail]>]

Hello John,

Thanks for your mail. I think we are getting closer to where we have a 
misunderstanding.

On 2012/07/13 22:36, John R Levine wrote:
>> Also, my proposal of different text for the "%-routing problem", which
>> is clearer about the source of the problem, in particular that it's an
>> implementation problem (correct escaping/unescaping) and not an
>> a-priori problem, hasn't been taken into account, and I don't know why.
>
> I looked at your language, and it seemed to me less clear than what's
> there.

Sorry about that. I don't claim that my text is perfect.

> The problem is very simple, some MTAs mishandle addresses that
> contain % signs.

Here is where we have the misunderstanding/disagreement. The original 
problem is NOT what MTAs do with addresses that contain % signs. If e.g. 
I enter something like [e-mail] into a To field in my 
MUA, then that might work somehow, or not, but that's secondary.

To continue, if there is an URI mailto:[e-mail], and 
it gets correctly converted to [e-mail], then that 
might work somehow, or not, but that's again irrelevant.

The actual problem we want to discuss (on which point I very strongly 
agree with John Klensin) is the case where there is e.g. an URI of the 
form mailto:[e-mail], which should end up in a 
mail to unlikely?[e-mail], but because the unescaping is 
missing, produces a mail to [e-mail].

The address [e-mail] is essentially wrong. What 
some mailers do with such an address, or with addresses containing % in 
general, just affects who wrongly gets (or doesn't get) the mail, and 
how easy it might be to debug the problem. But the problem happened earlier.


> All we need to do is note it, not tell people how we
> think they should fix it or work around it.

Just to note it may be okay (a nugde in the right direction for a fix 
can't hurt though), but what's important is that the focus has to be on 
unescaping %-encoding when moving from mailto: to raw email addresses, 
rather than on what mailers do with mail addresses that have a % in them.

BTW, the examples are all taken from RFC 6068, so again it might not be 
such a bad idea to reference it.

Regards,   Martin.


> Regards,
> John Levine, [e-mail], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
> "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.
>