273036 - Non-RFC-compliant "To" field crashes javamail from display name characters

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 273037

(MailNews Core :: MIME, defect)

Description

[stimits]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913

Mozilla allows a "display name" in memorized addresses. For one such address I
added "Jakarta: Tomcat Users". This results in sending this in the header:
To: Jakarta: Tomcat Users <[e-mail]>

This ended up with a javamail user telling me it crashes his software, I asked
him to check with javamail authors, who said the colon ":" is not valid in this
field, and that they would not fix this as it was a mozilla header compliance
issue. The "To" field requires screening out of non-RFC-allowed characters to
avoid crashing javamail.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create an address with a display name containing a colon.
2. Send to a javamail user.

Actual Results:  
1. Crash of javamail.
2. Complaint by javamail authors.

Expected Results:  
Any "to" field should be RFC-compliant. Perhaps this is a simple URL encoding
scheme to fix, I really don't know the RFC, I'm taking the word of the javamail
authors.

I mark this as critical because it results in a denial of service for javamail
users. The crash/hang is for javamail, not for Mozilla.

Comment 1

[stimits]

273037 contains slightly more information, 273036 was from hitting the submit
button too soon before completing the bug report. See 273037 and disregard 273036.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 273037 ***

Comment 2

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

V.Duplicate