[rt-users] rt 3.8.4 case sensitivity for e-mail addresses

[Graeme Fowler]

Jerrad Pierce wrote:
> Well something's wacky with your installation.

It was indeed (I work with Garry)...

During the upgrade the application of the sql-queries script to modify 
various tables we got a bit of output saying:

"Duplicate entry '[chinese chars]' for key 2"

The script, however, seemed to complete. After a lot of digging on 
Friday to compare/contrast charsets, collations and so on I found that 
the Users table was mainly using data types of varbinary - it should be 
varchar.

Somehow, in the past, a user had been created on submission of a spam 
case which had a "nul" character in the email address or name. During 
conversion it appeared that the "nul" truncated the data used in the 
table's index, making it use the same first three chars as another entry.

To fix it I had to drop the index, find the duplicates, shred them (so 
they were fully removed), recreate the index, then complete the table's 
conversion. Following that we had to reassign cases, transactions and so 
on to the right principals and then remove several others. It ended up 
being stupidly long-winded, and all because we didn't fully understand 
the original warning message.

We now have no case sensitivity (which is a relief!).

Graeme