iPhone Mail bug: Account Name with a comma

I seem to have found a bug in the SMTP implementation on the iPhone's Mail.app. When the iPhone sends an email the recipient will actually see two distinct senders, one sender is "Appleseed" and the other is "John" <Appleseed_John@Stanford.EDU>. Both sending addresses will be wrong and un-reply-able. Somehow, during the SMTP conversation, the iPhone is mishandling the from address if the display name contains a comma.



Here at the university we have a naming convention for email addresses as:

"Last, First" <Last_First@Stanford.EDU>

For example, assume your email account is set up like this:

Name: Appleseed, John
Address: Appleseed_John@Stanford.EDU

When the iPhone sends email the recipient will actually see two distinct senders, one sender is "Appleseed" and the other is "John" <Appleseed_John@Stanford.EDU>

The sender should of course be: "Appleseed, John" <Appleseed_John@Stanford.EDU>



I've tested this out sending email from the iPhone through various email servers and I'm fairly certain the bug is on the iPhone, as it happens no matter which SMTP server I use. If the email account has a comma in the display name the message will have a corrupt "From:" address, and the recipient will be unable to reply (since the address gets munged in transport).

I've also tested this out with other email clients, and they all properly send email from accounts with "Appleseed, John" as the display name.

iPhone, Mac OS X (10.4.10), iPhone Mail.app bug in SMTP parsing FROM address with comma in display name

Posted on Jul 5, 2007 10:12 AM

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4 replies

Jul 5, 2007 10:27 AM in response to epoxy

If you NOTICED the Mail.app used in OSX, you would see that the program does not inset a comma when the name is displayed as Last Name First Name.

I have never put a comma in the Mail.app but bet that would also cause a problem.

Typically, a comma after a name in the TO field suggests a second email address is forth coming.

ajm

Jul 5, 2007 10:39 AM in response to nycruza

If you NOTICED the iPhone email setup only allows you to input characters that are allowed in any given field. For example it removes from your keyboard non-standard characters when inputing an email address.

Though a comma in the display name of either a "from" or "to" address is fine in the format of

"Appleseed, John" <John_Appleseed@Domain.EDU>

If a comma in the display name causes Mail.app problems then that too should be fixed.

The display name field of an email address is allowed by RFC to have (if I remember correctly) quite a few of the non-alpha numeric ascii character.

iPhone Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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iPhone Mail bug: Account Name with a comma

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