1182935 - Recent change in format of "undisclosed-recipients:;" (one space added before semicolon)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[David White]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0
Build ID: 20131205075310

Steps to reproduce:

Users indicated that my UseBccInstead addon stopped working in its extended-recipients column for the thread pane. They said it began with version 38.0.1 of TB. My addon looks for the string "undisclosed-recipients:;" in the TO header and this was failing to be found.

I changed my code to dump the contents of the TO header for a newly sent email (using 38.0.1) which contained only BCC recipients. What I found is that the TO header now contains "undisclosed-recipients: ;" (note space between : and ;.


Actual results:

TO headers are containing "undisclosed-recipients: ;" instead of "undisclosed-recipients:;" for messages sent with only BCC recipients using TB 38.0.1.


Expected results:

I believe that the proper format from the spec says this should be "undisclosed-recipients:;" and it has always been this way in TB until recently. I am not sure if this is a bug or a desired change. But it does break my addon and I do not see the change documented (but I easily might have missed that).

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Joshua, can you comment on this?

Comment 2

[David White]

For what it may be worth, a user of my addon reported that he upgraded Thunderbird to version 38.1.0. And now my addon works like it did earlier. I have not personally checked this due to lack of time. But maybe this was caught/fixed already?

Comment 3

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

(In reply to David White from comment #0)
> I believe that the proper format from the spec says this should be
> "undisclosed-recipients:;" and it has always been this way in TB until
> recently. I am not sure if this is a bug or a desired change. But it does
> break my addon and I do not see the change documented (but I easily might
> have missed that).

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.4
   group           =   display-name ":" [group-list] ";" [CFWS]
   group-list      =   mailbox-list / CFWS / obs-group-list

undisclosed-recipients:; and undisclosed-recipients: ; are both equally valid and semantically identical.

Comment 4

[David White]

So this was done on purpose? There was an active decision to change this from ":;" to ": ;"? Interesting...

Comment 5

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

(In reply to David White from comment #4)
> So this was done on purpose? There was an active decision to change this
> from ":;" to ": ;"? Interesting...

I noticed the change, but the extra space is a fallout of some generic logic, and the extra logic required to eliminate it in emission isn't worth the aesthetics.

Comment 6

[David White]

Well, it really isn't a question of aesthetics for my addon. The change breaks it since it was looking for the old pattern. I can, of course, change my addon. I have this done and now have to submit the changes, etc to AMO.

I don't know if this is related or not. But prior to TB 38, if a message is sent with only BCC'ed recipients and if the pref "mail.compose.add_undisclosed_recipients" is set (which it always seemed to be by default), the TO address was always shown as "undisclosed-recipients:;". I note that now the TO address is shown blank. Any idea if this was intended or just another "fallout"?