[Kde-pim] KMime bug with Message-ID with two "at" signs.

[Gregory Schlomoff]

Hello,

I've recently received an email with the following Message-ID:
<017a01$2780$b680$@person at example.com>

As you can see, there are two @ signs, so KMime will fail parsing this
header and return an empty Message-ID.

Obviously, this email address is incorrect per RFC rules, yet, it
would be nice if KMime was more tolerant with real world examples. I
don't know what would be the impact of a mail with an invalid
Message-ID in KMail, but on the email client we're writting, it's
certainly not good :)

I've looked at the parsing code, which is at kmime_header_parsing.cpp,
in the parseAddrSpec() method, and I was wondering what would be the
best way to tweak the algorithm so that it would accept this kind of
address.

The current algorithm basically scans the string from the beginning
for atoms and quoted strings until it finds an @ sign, and then parses
the domain from here. So it fails because it returns "person" as the
domain for the example above, instead of "example.com"

My understanding is that, if we want to accept addresses with more
than one @ sign, the easiest way would be to start from the end of the
string and look for the first @ sign, split the string at this point,
and parse the domain and the local part separately.

What are your thoughts on this?

1. Do you agree that KMime should not return an invalid Message-ID
when presented with an address that contains two @ signs?
2. Do you agree that the current parsing code should be modified to
accept this case? (Other option: consider Message-IDs a more relaxed
form of email addresses, and have a different code to parse them)
3. Do you agree that the solution would be to look backwards from the
end of the string for an @ sign, parse the domain from here and the
local part from the beginning to this point?

Thanks for your feedback

Greg

--
Gregory Schlomoff
Founder, Better Inbox - http://betterinbox.com
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