Re: [Evolution] Semicolon and colon

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Wed, 2007-08-22 at 11:51 +0200, Daniel Nylander wrote:
> ons 2007-08-22 klockan 10:27 +0100 skrev Pete Biggs:
>
> > > Can someone reproduce this? It's clearly a bug (if I'm correct)
> >
> > Why is it 'clearly a bug'?  The mail standard says that recipients are
> > separated by commas with the semi-colon being used to terminate a group
> > of mailboxes to be delivered to.  In that respect Evo is adhering to the
> > standard correctly. (See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html)
> >
> > Why do you expect ';' and ',' to behave the same?
>
> If you're a user who are used to running Outlook (or Notes), for example
> replaced the Outlook client with Evolution, who are used to using ';' to
> separate addresses, and Evolution just ignores all addresses after the
> ';', that would be a usability 'feature'.

No, Evolution does not ignore the addresses after the ';'.  Evolution
passes on the 'To:' header as you've written it to your MTA.  It is the
MTA that decides how to deal with it.

> There are of course ways around this. Evolution could pop up a message
> saying that you should use ',' or just automagically replace all ';'
> with a standardized ','.

What happens if someone *meant* to put a semi-colon in - it *would* be a
bug if Evo blindly converted all semi-colons to commas.  Just because
another MUA does things wrongly, it doesn't mean that Evo has to follow
suit.

>  Being nice and informative towards the user is
> the key issue here, not brutally follow standards.

The standards aren't enforced by Evo, all Evo is doing is assuming that
the user knows what they are doing.

P.