413745 - In-Reply-To header should not end with slash

Status: REOPENED

(Bugzilla :: Email Notifications, enhancement)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

The In-Reply-To header within email notifications doesn't follow the RFC 2822 and ends with a slash (/). This could cause trouble for some clients.

in-reply-to     =       "In-Reply-To:" 1*msg-id CRLF
references      =       "References:" 1*msg-id CRLF
msg-id          =       [CFWS] "<" id-left "@" id-right ">" [CFWS]
id-left         =       dot-atom-text / no-fold-quote / obs-id-left
id-right        =       dot-atom-text / no-fold-literal / obs-id-right
no-fold-quote   =       DQUOTE *(qtext / quoted-pair) DQUOTE

Instead of using:
<[e-mail]/>

there should be following In-Reply-To header:
<[e-mail]>

Comment 1

[A. Shimono [:himorin]]

I think dot-atom-text allows trailing slash.

atext           =       ALPHA / DIGIT / ; Any character except controls,
                        "!" / "#" /     ;  SP, and specials.
                        "$" / "%" /     ;  Used for atoms
                        "&" / "'" /
                        "*" / "+" /
                        "-" / "/" /
                        "=" / "?" /
                        "^" / "_" /
                        "`" / "{" /
                        "|" / "}" /
                        "~"

atom            =       [CFWS] 1*atext [CFWS]

dot-atom        =       [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS]

dot-atom-text   =       1*atext *("." 1*atext)

Comment 2

[Marc Schumann [:Wurblzap]]

Yes, comment 1 is correct. Trailing slashes are legal.

Comment 3

[timeless]

this breaks gmail. stop it.

Comment 4

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Yeah, just because it's legal doesn't mean we need to deviate from what even the dumbest MUA can understand, unless we have a good reason.

Comment 5

[Frédéric Buclin]

Breaking Gmail is not an excuse if the spec says it's legal. In that case, Gmail should be fixed, not Bugzilla.

Comment 6

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Frederic, I cannot find a mail client which uses a trailing slash for the reference header. Even Thunderbird isn't using it. It would be nice to have a solid line for all the Mozilla products. Bugzilla is an exception at the moment. Why it should not be changed? Is there any major reason behind?

Comment 7

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Breaking Gmail is not an excuse if the spec says it's legal. In that case,
> Gmail should be fixed, not Bugzilla.

I agree. This is why the bug title says "should", not "must". (Otherwise, with the same reasoning, Firefox could turn up all pages blank that have even minor syntax errors, since after all the page needs to be fixed, not the browser).

Comment 8

[Marc Schumann [:Wurblzap]]

Ok, so all in all, Bugzilla is not as fault (by our current definition of being at fault, at least), as it's not violating the RFC. I gather it could be more considerate towards clients which have troubles with edge cases, though. So if we find a way to generate In-Reply-To headers which are RFC compliant and help more clients (watch me avoiding the word "broken" here), there's no reason not to. Maybe cutting off trailing slashes does it, unless we break something else in doing so.

Comment 9

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Has anybody contacted Gmail about this? If they're not following the RFC, I'm sure they'd be glad to fix it on their end.

Comment 10

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Also, I'm not particularly interested in breaking people's threads on their next Bugzilla upgrade just because there's some non-RFC-compliant client, even if that client is very popular.

Comment 11

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

I contacted Gmail now. Let us wait if/when we will get response.