GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 558037
Evolution: Accept semicolons, as well as commas, as email-address separators in the "TO" address field.
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:03:27 UTC
In a number of mail clients, including Outlook and Gmail, users can use commas as well as semicolons to separate email addresses. For example, these are both valid: TO: fred@test.com, john@test.com TO: fred@test.com; john@test.com Once a user has gotten used to using a delimiter, it's a barrier-to-adopting a mail client to change this. Could evolution support ';' as well as ',' as a delimiter for email addresses please? What happens when trying to do this: The mail sits on the outbox, then a warning appears: "Error while performing operation. RCPT TO <"; john"@test.com> failed: <; john@test.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual alias table" Closest bug I could see for this in my dupe search: Bug 485271 - note however that this bug talks about adding spaces as delimiter as well, which looks like a bad idea to me.
Please tell us the RFC that defines this as valid behaviour.
RFC 2822, section 3.4 has the grammar for address lists. It doesn't look like we even try to parse group addresses, probably because we have Contact Lists for this sort of thing: group = display-name ":" [mailbox-list] ";" As long as that's true and we have no intention to parse group addresses, then supporting both commas and semicolons as address delimiters sounds feasible. Anyway, the relevant widget lives in libedataserverui, so changing component.
> Please tell us the RFC that defines this as valid behaviour. I have no idea what an RFC has to do with this. This is all about user-interfaces, and what users are used to - i.e. the defacto standard user-experience for addressing emails. And the reality is that what a lot of people are using right now supports both commas and semicolons as delimiters. And when that works elsewhere, but it doesn't work in Evolution, the user will conclude it's a problem with Evolution, not with some RFC - and they will be correct.
Discussed a little on the mailing list, including link in case it's of use: http://www.mail-archive.com/evolution-list@gnome.org/msg13771.html
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