89945 - underscores in POP server hostname will not be accepted

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Account Manager, enhancement)

Description

[sven.papperitz]

If you have an POP server name like pop_mainz.<somthing else> you will get an 
errormessage that you have to specify an valid hostname. The problem is the 
underscore in the hostname. This worked well 'til Mozilla 0.9

Comment 1

[mwehner]

I don't think this qualifies as bug, because according to rfc952/1123 the
underscore character is not valid in internet hostnames.

Just in case, the check lives here:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/base/prefs/resources/content/aw-server.js#33

Comment 2

[Alex Bishop]

I'm pretty certain that hostnames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z
and 0-9) and hyphens (-). It looks like the code has been deliberately designed
to only accept these characters.

Resolving as INVALID. Reporter, if you know of any hostnames that contain
underscores, please reopen this bug. Thanks for testing Mozilla!

Comment 3

[Sheela Ravindran]

verified as invalid based on comments below. Please, Reopen the bug if there are 
any hostnames with underscores.

Comment 4

[Sheela Ravindran]

reporters comments via email: 
Hi,

you can reopen this problem. Our POP server is called pop_mainz.ncs. ... Thats 
why I found this problem ... 8-)))

Thanks a lot, Sven

Comment 5

[Sheela Ravindran]

reporter,
Can we get a test account on that server?

Comment 6

[Sheela Ravindran]

reporters comments via email 

Hi,

no chance, it's our internal POP server. But if you try to use an hostname with 
underscores you will get this errormessage. Where's the problem ? 8-))

Comment 7

[Sheela Ravindran]

using 2001071306 branch build I did see error "please enter valid hostname" when 
I tried to create a new account and specified the server as pop_mainz.ncs.  I am 
confirming the bug since the reporter has some internal server named with 
underscore. 

Comment 8

[Jo Hermans]

It's still an invalid hostname, internal or not. Ask your admin to create an
alias like pop-mainz (with a dash), if you really want to use that pop-server.

Comment 9

[Christian Eyrich]

*** Bug 145069 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 11

[Christian Eyrich]

*** Bug 206893 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[stefano]

HI,

 There are plenty of duplicates of this bug, e.g. 172165, 203566, 153971,
990263, 145069.
 
 THis essentially happens for all the operating systems and all the mozilla
versions I tried, for all the possible IMAP/POP servers you can think of.

  It seems to be happening (but I might be wrong) when adding servers to
profiles that have been imported. Somebody in one of the duplicates I mentiones
suggests a web site that shows how to clean your profile, but the exact URL is
not given. Also, I dont' think that it would be acceptable solution, as both the
import and adding an account should run smoothly.

  Nobody seems to be interested in solving this, so I guess I will have to come
up with a patch myself.

Regards,
Stefano

Comment 13

[Gemma L.C. Anible]

I can speak for another 1500 people (fellow students at my college) who use
underscores in their POP and SMTP server names. (Whether underscores are valid
in hostnames is irrelevant. If people use underscores, MozillaMail should allow
underscores--changing the server name or finding its IP address should not be
prerequisite to using email software.)

Comment 14

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** Bug 214972 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** Bug 153971 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Thomas Holaday]

At least one email-validation (antispam) system works by establishing a local
proxy, where the proxy name contains an underscore.  What about changing the
behavior from "underscore forbidden" to "underscore in hostname, ask for
confirmation, gripe about failure to conform to RFC, and proceed"?

Comment 17

[Malte Rücker (mbr)]

*** Bug 216603 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[Tomer Gabel]

This bug is anything but new, but still relevant. While I certainly agree that adhering to standards is important, adhering to de-facto standards is equally important if acceptance of the software is to be attained -- Firefox supports many nonstandard CSS/HTML hacks merely because IE does, otherwise far less people would use it.

I created a hosts-file entry for my particular server, but that is not really a solution; underscores in host names ARE a de-facto standard whether I/you/we like it or not.

Comment 19

[:Hb]

WFM with SM 2.0.6 under Windows XP.

Comment 20

[:aceman]

I think this will appear again in TB24 as since TB19 (bug 80855) it will reject hostnames with underscores and now the check is also applied onto SMTP/POP3/IMAP4/News servers in the account manager.

I worry enterprises may be hit by this. Standard8, can you make a poll on some TB-enterprise mailing list how bad this "problem" may be for them?
We can still tweak this for the upcoming TB24 if the need arises from the poll.

I change the severity to "enhancement" as there is no bug in TB (per the standard), but we could allow lessening the strict checks for users that indicate they know what they are doing (a pref or a confirmation dialog).

Comment 21

[:aceman]

As a hint, there is already another enterprise-y edge case cropped up in bug 913785.

Comment 22

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Hrm, so I didn't get to this before 24 was released, but I'm also not seeing anyone complaining.

Whilst I sympathise with those that do have underscores, I think it is reasonable that we reject invalid hostnames, given that we're also telling the user this is invalid, then I think that is reasonable.

We could allow underscores, however, my concerns are that something in the core gecko code changes to disallow the underscores, and hence at that stage we'd more likely result in an error unseen by the user, rather than an informative message.

Therefore I think we can won't fix this, however, we can monitor feedback as TB 24 rolls out further and reconsider if necessary.

Comment 23

[:aceman]

Well, Firefox got hit by exactly that problem. Various levels in the code were having different ideas what a valid hostname is. Anyway, Firefox seems to officially support _ in hostnames, temporarily disallowing them in FF36 seems to be considered a mistake.
See bug 1136616 for details.

So can we somehow still make it explicit that the _ is an invalid character but allow it in the account manager? Maybe tell the user that he is proceeding at his own risk. Or having a pref for enterprises?

Comment 24

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I don't think it's worth supporting. You set it up once, and you have an easy workaround of using the IP directly if the admin can't be bothered to use a valid hostname. +, just a hand full of complaints in 14 years.

Comment 25

[Kent James (:rkent)]

I'm happy with keeping this WONTFIX for now, but if anyone in the future ends up at this bug and does not agree, I think we should encourage "me too" comments there that support re-opening this. Officially we seem to discourage that, then unofficially we ignore the bug for lack of "me too" comments or dups.