From: Matthieu Lemerre <racin@free.fr>
To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Warning when GMime is parsing broken email addresses
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.5 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.2.1
	(i486-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:20:26 +0100
Message-ID: <87ipzvk2xh.fsf@free.fr>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Hi,

I just realized that GMime is not robust to some broken email addresses
sent by broken email clients. I received a mail, with the to field being

xxxx.yyyy <uuuu-vvvv@gmail.com>

The email client (Exchange) had forgotten to put a "" around
"xxxx.yyyy", which is necessary because `.' is a special character, and
this confused GMime. This resulted in notmuch storing xxxx.yyyy as the
email address, instead of using uuuu-vvvv@gmail.com. Because of that I
had trouble finding one of my mail using a to: in the search terms.

I have filed a bug report for GMime
(https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=545333), but I just wanted
to make people using notmuch aware of this problem, because I guess that
such problems might be extremely common.

Maybe it would also be interesting to add a warning/assertion to check
that all email adresses added to the database are correct email
addresses? I.e. check that the `addr' variable in _index_address_mailbox
always has a @. This check is in fact already done using the function
strchr, but a bad value is explicitly ignored...

Matthieu