Solved Quotes not allowed in e-mailaddresses

A

AXQ73

Verified User
Joined
Jul 13, 2021
Messages
37
Hi,

this is a bug for as far as i'm concerned. DirectAdmin rejects e-mailadresses with quotes, such as my'[email protected]. According to all RFC documentations single quotes and double quotes are allowed (and used, although rarely).

I assume it has something todo that DirectAdmin uses one field for the username and e-mail and a quote in a username is not likely to pass. But now it is not possible to submit e-mailaddresses which are legit.

Can this be solved?
 
I'ts allowed according to RFC 5322, it's advised not to use it. Even certain mail adresses will be refused, for example by Gmail.
Things change. It can be seen also as string delimiter, confusing systems. Big change Microsoft services (outlook/hotmail/live) will refuse them too.
One can better not use them.

AXQ73 said:
Can this be solved?
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I would suggest using the feature request for that.

Upvoty

feedback.directadmin.com feedback.directadmin.com
 
Thx Richard,

i know, i cannot see the benefits using such chars in and address. You can imagine how many times an address owner has to spell such address. That said for me as an developer i get to deal with this. My client needs this, it's allowed and my reply 'the system won't allow me' is just lame :-)

Next to this i think it's somewhat pretentious to set aside a RFC.

The client involved is using Microsoft Exchange and is currently using a single quote in the address... so i'm curious how that will proceed.

Regards,
Alex
 
AXQ73 said:
it's allowed and my reply 'the system won't allow me' is just lame :)
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It's not really lame, as it's professional to warn the user that it just doesn't get accepted by major mail systems like Gmail.
I can also point out to an old RFC of Exim, which limits the amount of characters in mails which could be used to rather few. So one in fact couldn't use long mails. We had to adjust that too. Some RFC's are just in need to be updated.

So no, it's not pretentious to set aside an RFC, depending on what the RFC is doing and how and if it's implemented worldwide.

But ofcourse I do agree it's a difficult situation.
Especially for this reason I'm also very curious as to how it will proceed with Microsoft Exchange and his experiences in mailing to bigger mail systems.

We do have some mail experts on this forum, two of them is @mxroute and @Swift-AU and maybe they can shed some light on this or share they experience on how they handle this. Since it is indeed an RFC.
 
Hey Richard,

this is a company with a revenue close to a billion euro. They will think this is a lame excuse. It's a pain to have your employees change their e-mailaddresses, imagine you had to do this because of your 'control panel doesn't allow it'.

Creation is a totally different situation, then i agree with you and advice strongly against it. However i except a control panel to at least make it possible and not just block it.

I share your curiousness about MS Ex and their support.

Alex

For now i left DirectAdmin and took care of it another way.
 
Hello Alex.
AXQ73 said:
They will think this is a lame excuse.
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They will have to rethink it then if they experience their mails being rejected. But I fully understand your issue here, especially for such a big company. In that case your hands are tied and since RFC allows it, that makes things difficult.

AXQ73 said:
However i except a control panel to at least make it possible and not just block it.
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Agreed. Which is why I asked the other two on how they think about it. Might be that some change is needed, because I don't know if it's blocked by the DA exim.conf file or that it's Exim itself not taking care of this (which would be an Exim bug).
If it's a shortcoming of DA itself against RFC's, we then could support the request to implement the RFC compliance.

AXQ73 said:
For now i left DirectAdmin and took care of it another way.
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Understandable. I hope you keep us updated on how it will work with MS Ex, as far as it's possible for you.

Best regards,
 
Thanks Richard,

for your time and clear explanation. Just to complete things; they have not reported rejection issues. So Gmail may not allow you to create such addresses, they do seem to accept e-mail from addresses with these chars in them.

Alex
 
AXQ73 said:
Next to this i think it's somewhat pretentious to set aside a RFC.
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To many of us, it seems most pretentious to go out seeking out RFCs to validate what is otherwise weird behavior, and then declare that the rest of the internet is doing it wrong because you dug through enough books to go "Gotcha!" RFCs are not the laws of the internet, and no one is required to treat them otherwise. Over time those documents that sit there for years fall flat in the face of large companies who are trying to adapt to realtime trends that impact 90%+ of their userbase and they'll gladly toss out an old "rule" someone wrote a decade or more ago when no one is even using that "rule" to begin with.

It's a weird character and there's no demand for it, you have found the only client in the world who cares about it. This won't be fixed, you'll need to build them a custom system because it sounds like they don't do things the way the rest of us do. I'll eat crow if the DA devs disagree, but I suspect this won't be something they spend a moment on. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of "fix" actually required Exim and/or Dovecot dev teams to get on board with it, which I can almost certainly say they wouldn't do.
 
Really? Mxroute? I live in a world of customers, if you read my comments you would have seen it is definitely not my choice. I cannot for the live of me understand why anyone wants these chars in their e-mailaddress. However as stated i have to deal with it and in that retrospect finding out a panel so widely spread (and not cheap i might add) does not adhere to those RFC strikes me as not correct. Motivation 'thy shallt not use this' brings me back to the early Microsoft days where other people dictate in their wishdom how i must set aside agreements already made. Pretentious.
 
zEitEr, i'm not trying to change anyones mind.

Frankly i find you as Super Moderator and other Verified users quite unfriendly. No one has tried to help. All i hear is you are opionated to the idea that this should not be used. And apparently if i don't agree with you i get such reactions.

If you read my posts i already solved my issue another way, but you find it necessary to keep telling me i'm wrong.
 
Thanks for your opinion. Yes, I know that posts from many of us might sound unfriendly, we are not native speakers, and not everybody knows how to sound polite in English. I'm not an exception.

As of the issue, you've faced. I would expect to see a list of steps to re-produce the issue and/or at least an exact error you've seen there. And if it's a hardcoded filter of directadmin that prevents you from using a quote mark in an email name, we can not help you. Regular users and admins (as well as me) do not have access to directadmin code.

Anyway, good to know you've managed to solve the issue. I'm sorry your expectations were not satisfied.
 
zEitEr, thanks for your message. I usually don't care so much how anyone writes but i got personal whilst i was trying to explain i don't like quotes in addresses either :-) but i need to help my client and since it is not a 5 employee company but more 10000+ me trying to change them is no fight i wish to engage in.

I am no native speaker/writer also. For the sake of your question: my first post describes what goes wrong, the validation pattern on the e-mailaddress field directly turns the input field red when you hit a quote (single or double) so it already ends there. I know how to bypass such a pattern but obviously DA knows their stuff and that does not work. I just have feeling they validate it on the basis it's gonna be the username also and not so much the emailaddress itself.

As far as code change I expected as much, therefor i left DA for this assignment.

I've searched where to open a support ticket but could not find it, is it accessable for me as a DA renter (i rent DA via my supplier for our servers, i do not own a license myself).
 
OK, I see. I've searched DirectAdmin configs, help pages, and there isn't an option to allow quotes in emails names. DirectAdmin support team needs to be involved here. As even if we manage to create email accounts with quotes in names manually, other operation in DirectAdmin interface and nightly maintains (edit, remove, limits, tally) might work wrong. I guess routing in Exim, Dovecot can be fixed without big efforts though.
 
Yeah, i figured as much. So i think we'll leave it here then. Thx for your efforts.
 
AXQ73 said:
Frankly i find you as Super Moderator and other Verified users quite unfriendly.
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Unfriendly? That is a blunt opinion. We have been very friendly. There is a difference between being unfriendly and being unable to help but trying to point in the right direction. Especially @zEitEr is always friendly imho.

We have tried to explain to you that in spite of the fact that we do understand your issue, we can't help you with it or change it and even stronger, that the risk is involved that other systems will just block things. And also because there is no or very little demand for it in the world, which we tried to warn you for, the chance is very small it gets fixed.

So we pointed you where you had to be, next to our opinion that the customer (not you) is not being wise and it's up to the devs (maybe even Exim devs) to fix.

Anyway, as said, good you found another solution.
 
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