[imp] To's with () in them, IMP escape them but fails to deliver mail

Bob Maple bobm-imp at burner.com
Wed Mar 5 15:04:18 PST 2003


I posted awhile back about a problem with IMP when replying to messages
whose To: headers have recipients with backslashes in them. Some mail
clients like Outlook (I know, I know, but I can't control what the world
uses) like to put "(E-Mail)" after a person's name in the header if sent
from the person's contact list.  However when it sends these mails, Outlook
escapes the parenthesis with a backslash, so the header in the message you
get looks like:

To: "Some Person \(E-Mail\)" <someone at somedomain.com>

However, IMP displays this by escaping the backslash again, resulting in:

To: "Some Person \\(E-Mail\\)" <someone at somedomain.com>

I am sending this mail to the list with such a To: header which might help
show the problem, assuming the list doesn't reformat it.
In any event, whether or not it's escaped or double escaped doesn't matter,
and you can duplicate the problem by manually typing in an address in IMP
yourself and shoving a backslash in it similar to either of the above
examples.

The problem is that when you send the mail, however, it doesn't actually
send..  You don't get any error--nothing out of the ordinary gets logged--
but mail never makes it into our queue.  I'm running qmail, with imp calling
it's sendmail wrapper which otherwise works.

I've browsed through the source as best as I'm capable but so far can't tell
where all this escaping is happening, or why/how exactly it's failing.  I
tried some manual tests using some of the PEAR classes IMP uses for
formatting addresses but haven't been able to duplicate the escaping either.

Any help appreciated.  Users are replying to these occasional messages that
come in this way and their replies disapear into the bit bucket.

|  Bob Maple  |  bobm_at_burner_dot_com  |  [http] burner.com
|
|  Thom Yorke: "Here's to getting hitched, Space Ghost."
|  SG: "Yeah..  Lets drink until our hearts stop."



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