[Dovecot] Address Extensions with System Users
Bill Cole
dovecot-20061108 at billmail.scconsult.com
Sat Apr 18 09:05:48 EEST 2009
Scott Silva wrote, On 4/17/09 1:27 PM:
[...]
> AFAIR the RFC's state that all e-mail addresses are acted on in lowercase when
> being manipulated. The upper case parts are left intact only for human beings
> to read.
That is very wrong. Email address local-parts MUST be treated as
case-sensitive in SMTP because historically many hosts (including most
systems resembling Unix) have treated usernames as case-sensitive and used
local-parts that map to directories on case-sensitive filesystems. So RFC's
821, 822, 2821, and 5321 all explicitly state that local-parts are
case-sensitive and RFC's 2822 and 5322 say it indirectly by way of the ABNF
spec. The one exception is "postmaster", which gets special treatment as the
only address that has to exist in every domain.
Note that the transport and header case-sensitivity does not automatically
translate into how delivery agents and mailstore agents work. In this case,
the case-folding is being done by Postfix's "local" component, which is its
documented behavior.
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