Improved email address tokeniser on /beta/

Post categories

Profile picture for Rob Mueller

Founder & CTO

The new web interface attempts to convert email addresses put in the To/Cc/Bcc boxes on the compose screen into “tokens”. However there were a number of bugs with the current implementation listed on our wiki bug page:

  1. Email addresses surrounded by ’ (single quotes) were handled poorly,
    partly disappearing, but still being left in the data sent back to
    the server
  2. Email addresses where the “phrase” part had more than one , (comma)
    in it were split incorrectly. For example: “smith, john, help
    center” <johnsmith@example.com>
  3. Email addresses where the “phrase” part had a angle-bracketed
    address were handling incorrectly. For example:
    “<johnsmith@example.com>” <johnsmith@example.com>

I’ve now completely rewritten the address parser, and put it on our beta server for testing. The new parser fixes all of the above problems, should be more resilient to odd address formats, and now allows you to do things like paste a list of email address with only spaces between them (rather than having to put commas) and it should tokenise them correctly.

If you come across any new problems, please email me directly at robm@fastmail.fm with details including an example of how to reproduce
the problem and I’ll look into it.

Update 16-Apr-2009: Since there were no reported problems, I’ve now rolled out the new tokeniser to the production servers.

Profile picture for Rob Mueller

Founder & CTO