0008252: Gravatars and case sensitivity of email addresses - MantisBT - Signup temporarily disabled due to spam

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0008252	mantisbt	feature	public	2007-08-10 14:02	2007-10-04 01:38

Reporter	DGtlRift	Assigned To	giallu
Priority	normal	Severity	trivial	Reproducibility	always
Status	closed	Resolution	fixed
Product Version	1.1.0a4
Fixed in Version	1.1.0rc1

Summary	0008252: Gravatars and case sensitivity of email addresses
Description	When I set up a gravatar account, it changed any uppercase chars in my email domain to lowercase. In my mantis account, my email address has those domain chars as uppercase, so when it computes the md5sum it will not match the record of the gravatar.
Steps To Reproduce	Change email address in mantis to use an uppercase char gravatar will not appear.
Additional Information	As a work around, and trying to figure out what was going on, I changed my email address to lowercase in mantis and that seemed to fix the problem. Today, however, I can't seem to get it to work. Is there a test page on the gravatar site for generating the URL from an email?
Tags	No tags attached.

vboctor 2007-08-10 15:28 manager ~0015401	The question is: Does gravatar always lowercase emails? If so, then we should lower case the email before using it to construct the image url. If gravatar uses the the same case that was entered to it, then it is the user's responsibility to write the email in the same case.

giallu 2007-08-10 17:42 reporter ~0015406	the point is, email is not case sensitive, so USER@example.com is the same as user@example.com. So I guess they are really converting the emails to lowercase. I will do the same before calculating the md5 in mantis so we can see how it behave

ryandesign 2007-08-10 20:44 reporter ~0015409	Traditional domain names are not case-sensitive, but mailbox names might be. (IDN domain names with non-ASCII characters are another story.) The Wikipedia [1] quotes RFC 2821 [2] which states that the local part of the email address (the part before the "@" sign) "MUST BE treated as case sensitive. [...] However, exploiting the case sensitivity of mailbox local-parts impedes interoperability and is discouraged." This suggests that a) Gravatar should not be altering the case of the local part of email addresses, and b) it is not possible for Mantis or any other system to divine whether or not a remote email system's local parts are case-sensitive or not. However, as long as Gravatar has this bug, lowercasing the address will probably be the only way for Mantis to keep up. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address [2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2821

ryandesign 2007-08-10 20:47 reporter ~0015410	Sorry, I just noticed the original report does indeed only mention chars in the domain name, which is, per RFC, case-insensitive. And I see that the change in revision 1.111 of user_api.php of Mantis is that the entire email address is lowercased. We should only be lowercasing the domain name part.

giallu 2007-08-11 03:01 reporter ~0015413	I am all for following the standards, but you also have to take into account how those are actually implemented. mailbox names "might be" case sensitive, but in practice I never saw a server/service applying that. Try for example sending a mail to my gmail account, using any conbination of upper/lower case: GIALLU, Giallu GIAllu are all delivered to my maildir. I verified Gravatar is lowercaseing the mailbox part, so the fix as it stands is correct.

giallu 2007-08-13 18:02 reporter ~0015433	So. is there anything left to see here?

ryandesign 2007-08-13 19:43 reporter ~0015434	Nope. :)

MantisBT: master a478eb91 2007-08-10 18:17 giallu Details Diff	Fix 8252: Gravatars and case sensitivity of email addresses git-svn-id: http://mantisbt.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mantisbt/trunk@4539 <a class="text" href="/?p=mantisbt.git;a=object;h=f5dc347c">f5dc347c</a>-c33d-0410-90a0-b07cc1902cb9		Affected Issues 0008252
	mod - core/user_api.php		Diff File