dovecot - Aug 2012 - Sieve/pigeonhole rejects email addresses for valid UNIX users

Self-explanatory, I hope (note the period on the end of the username); 
sieve/pigeonhole does not allow you to have senders which end with a 
period, which means that any UNIX users with such usernames who send 
mail have it rejected by sieve:

# useradd testuser.
# su - testuser.
$ mail david at example.com -s 'testing'
123
.
[testuser. at levi ~]$ logout

# less /var/log/maillog

Aug 22 07:50:56 levi dovecot: lda(david at example.com): Error: sieve: 
envelope sender address 'testuser. at myhost.example.com' is unparsable

Versions:
dovecot-pigeonhole-0.2.6-21.el5
dovecot-managesieve-0.2.6-21.el5
dovecot-2.0.18-1_134.el5

Why would anyone have a UNIX username ending in a period? For one, web 
hosting companies may use your domain name as your username - but be 
subject to a 32-character limit, so your domain name gets truncated.

David

-- 
WordShell - WordPress fast from the CLI - www.wordshell.net

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 09:56:04AM +0300, David Anderson
wrote:
> Self-explanatory, I hope (note the period on the end of the
> username); sieve/pigeonhole does not allow you to have senders which
> end with a period, which means that any UNIX users with such
> usernames who send mail have it rejected by sieve:
> 
> # useradd testuser.
> # su - testuser.
> $ mail david at example.com -s 'testing'
> 123
> .
> [testuser. at levi ~]$ logout
> 
> # less /var/log/maillog
> 
> Aug 22 07:50:56 levi dovecot: lda(david at example.com): Error: sieve:
> envelope sender address 'testuser. at myhost.example.com' is
unparsable
Afaik local-part can't have period as the first or the last character by
RFC ... But correct me if I am wrong. At least according to wikipedia:

The local-part of the email address may use any of these ASCII characters
RFC 5322 Section 3.2.3, RFC 6531 permits Unicode beyond the ASCII range:
[...]
Character . (dot, period, full stop) (ASCII: 46) provided that it is not the
first or last character, and provided also that it does not appear two or
more times consecutively (e.g. John..Doe at example.com is not allowed.).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Local_part

I think nowdays it's a bit outdated to have 1:1 mapping between UNIX users
and email addresses anyway. Maybe it's OK, but it's surely problematic
in
case of mass hosting with many users with policies like you mentioned as
well. Virtual users (in the sense of MTA/IMAP/etc servers) are much better
idea, in my oppinion. It's OK for a small "server" used for own
purposes for
example. But it's only my opinion ...

Op 8/22/2012 8:56 AM, David Anderson schreef:
>
> Self-explanatory, I hope (note the period on the end of the username); 
> sieve/pigeonhole does not allow you to have senders which end with a 
> period, which means that any UNIX users with such usernames who send 
> mail have it rejected by sieve:
>
> # useradd testuser.
> # su - testuser.
> $ mail david at example.com -s 'testing'
> 123
> .
> [testuser. at levi ~]$ logout
>
> # less /var/log/maillog
>
> Aug 22 07:50:56 levi dovecot: lda(david at example.com): Error: sieve: 
> envelope sender address 'testuser. at myhost.example.com' is
unparsable
>
> Versions:
> dovecot-pigeonhole-0.2.6-21.el5
> dovecot-managesieve-0.2.6-21.el5
> dovecot-2.0.18-1_134.el5
>
> Why would anyone have a UNIX username ending in a period? For one, web 
> hosting companies may use your domain name as your username - but be 
> subject to a 32-character limit, so your domain name gets truncated.
I would have expected to see that address escaped as 
"testuser."@myhost.example.com. I notice that I haven't tested
such
addresses much with Sieve and I don't actually know in what form MTAs 
provide such addresses to the LDA. I'll give that a look soon.

Regards,

Stephan.

On 22.8.2012, at 9.56, David Anderson wrote:
> Aug 22 07:50:56 levi dovecot: lda(david at example.com): Error: sieve:
envelope sender address 'testuser. at myhost.example.com' is unparsable
Also is this really rejecting the mail?.. When I looked at it I thought it would
simply replace the sender with empty string.