[rt-users] Decoding quoted mail addresses in RT mailgate

[Philipp Niemann]

Hello!

Though I searched the past four month of listarchive for something
similar, I haven't found anything near. Hear this:

We have RT Version 3.4.4 installed on a Debian/GNU Linux Release sarge
with modperl and apache1.

Some of our users have MS Outlook as MUA. Our realname policy for email
is: "surname, given name" <email.address at dimdi.de>

Everything is just fine as long as the name of the user doesn't contain
any special chars like German umlauts or such. In case of a special char
in the surname or given name, Outlook encodes the From header according
to RFC. The problem is that Outlook (wrongly) encodes the quotation marks
into the From address, too.

When such an encoded From Address arrives at RT mailgateway, the
software does the following (I added Umlauts to the names for accuracy):

1) Realise the From is quoted
2) Start with a Quotation mark: "
3) Decode Address: "surnäme, given näme"
4) End encoded string with quotation mark: "
5) Add mail address itself

Result:
""surnäme, given näme"" <email.address at dimdi.de>

Which in turn results in Autoreply Mail from RT destined to User "" and
User "" -- and RT not realizing the (existing) User. The resulting ticket
is listed with Requestor "".

Wrong behaviour. My own MUA, mutt, decodes this stuff correctly,
prepending a backslash to the encoded quotation marks after decoding,
resulting in the correctly decoded From address like this:

"\"surnäme, given näme\"" <email.address at dimdi.de>

I tried to figure out which perl module is the right to file a bug
against. I don't think this is RT itself as RT uses lots of perl mods to
decode email. Might be Mail::Address, right?

As I don't have any hope of getting rid of Outlook I would greatly
appreciate hints on the right module or ideas for a workaround.

I have some tcpdump sessions with very detailed information about the
issue. Feel free to ask for further details if needed.

Regards,
Philipp
-- 
Philipp Niemann                                       DIMDI
Abteilung D / AG D4
Peripherie / UNIX-Systembetreuer     Waisenhausgasse 36-38a
Tel. : 0221/4724-281                            50676 Koeln