GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 242499
multiple TO: address separator should include a semicolon
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:44:55 UTC
Please fill in this template when reporting a bug, unless you know what you are doing. Description of Problem: Steps to reproduce the problem: 1. Create an email message 2. in the To: field enter several addresses separated by a ; 3. email gets sent, Actual Results: Email gets sent to 1st address only. silently dropping the 2nd, 3rd, 4th (etc) addresses. Expected Results: I would have expected this email program to act like all other graphical emailers I've ever used. (I've been sending email since 1988, but thats besides the point). How often does this happen? Always Additional Information: The world has been brainwashed to expect that ; will delimit email addresses. I know what the RFC says on the matter, but that too is besides the point. It pains me to say that the Microsoft convention of allowing ; to separate email addresses is way into my DNA by this point and I would argue that not recongising ; as an address delimiter is a bug. Also I would claim it is a bug not to warn the user that you are ignoring the rest of the addresses on the line. I'm hoping this is already fixed in a later version. Thanks for your help.
*** bug 242500 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** bug 242501 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
semicolon has a speacial meaning in email addresses that said, this is really an addressbook feature request since the addressbook can do whatever it wants in those text entry fields, so long as it gives the mailer syntactically correct email address lists
Jeff thanks. I agree, as long as being an "addressbook" issue includes the functionality of entering an address(s) that isn't in any addressbook, ie To: foo@bar.com; bar@foo.com; mike@bluejavelin.net goes out correctly addressed to these three destinations (currently the email will only go to foo@bar.com). Thanks again.
*** bug 244572 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
still valid in 2.1.6
Bumping version to a stable release.
*** Bug 485271 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 466959 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 589572 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
If we didn't want to bend towards an erratic behaviour and using ; as a separator, I'd propose adding a hint when the user uses ; as a separator like this: "Dear User, I've noticed that you've used ; as a separator, this is against Internet standard (insert the standard URL here) since someone may use ; as part of his email address. For this time I've changed all your ';' into ',', but please don't use ';' as mail separator any more. (and a series of radio buttons follow:) [x] OK, I got it. [ ] I love ';' and I wish to use it in the future, don't warn me anymore" Silently dropping mails to 2nd, 3rd, 4th receivers is evil.
Still in 3.2.3
I've noticed that bug #558037 and bug #563164 are duplicates of this bug, please mark them as such. I encountered this bug because my mother copied many addresses from the "To:" field of a forwarded e-mail to a new e-mail she was writing with Evolution. After sending it she looked in the sent mail and noticed that all e-mail addresses except for the first had been dropped. I later figured out that this was caused by the forwarded message having the e-mail addresses separated by the semicolon. To solve it I copied all e-mail addresses to gedit and replaced all semicolons with commas, then sent the e-mail again. But I feel embarrassed, this isn't helping to convince my mother and the rest of my family that Linux is user friendly. As they said in bug #558037 and the mailing list discussion linked there, it would probably be best if Evolution simply converted semicolons into commas when an e-mail gets sent. If that's not possible just warn the user that semicolons shouldn't be used and offer to convert them to commas immediately. To be honest I'm surprised that this high impact bug is almost ten years old but still hasn't been solved, even with such simple solutions. Developers, please don't take this as user ungratefulness. I like Evolution and use it daily, but please fix this high priority bug.
I have just made test with Evolution 3.26.1-1 in Ubuntu 17.10, by sending an email with two "TO:" recipients delimited by ';' and this email reached both recipients. Anyone else fancy to confirm it?
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 (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 enhancement request ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.