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Bug 558037 - Evolution: Accept semicolons, as well as commas, as email-address separators in the "TO" address field.
Evolution: Accept semicolons, as well as commas, as email-address separators ...
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: evolution-data-server
Classification: Platform
Component: Mailer
2.24.x (obsolete)
Other All
: Normal enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: evolution-mail-maintainers
Evolution QA team
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2008-10-27 02:38 UTC by Nick Jenkins
Modified: 2021-05-19 11:03 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: Unversioned Enhancement



Description Nick Jenkins 2008-10-27 02:38:35 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.
Comment 1 André Klapper 2008-10-27 10:02:40 UTC
Please tell us the RFC that defines this as valid behaviour.
Comment 2 Matthew Barnes 2008-10-27 16:51:25 UTC
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.
Comment 3 Nick Jenkins 2008-10-27 22:39:14 UTC
> 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.
Comment 4 Nick Jenkins 2010-02-19 09:02:47 UTC
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
Comment 5 André Klapper 2021-05-19 11:03:27 UTC
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. 
As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled).

If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow
  https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines
and create a new ticket at
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution-data-server/-/issues/

Thank you for your understanding and your help.