rfc

WTFWG
[01:54:25] matt [wronka.org]/navic The WHATWG can take a good idea and make it useless. Take for example their "willful violations":


A valid e-mail address is a string that matches the email production of the following ABNF, the character set for which is Unicode. This ABNF implements the extensions described in RFC 1123. [ABNF] [RFC5322] [RFC1034] [RFC1123]

email = 1*( atext / "." ) "@" label *( "." label )
label = let-dig [ [ ldh-str ] let-dig ] ; limited to a length of 63 characters by RFC 1034 section 3.5
atext = < as defined in RFC 5322 section 3.2.3 >
let-dig = < as defined in RFC 1034 section 3.5 >
ldh-str = < as defined in RFC 1034 section 3.5 >

This requirement is a willful violation of RFC 5322, which defines a syntax for e-mail addresses that is simultaneously too strict (before the "@" character), too vague (after the "@" character), and too lax (allowing comments, whitespace characters, and quoted strings in manners unfamiliar to most users) to be of practical use here.

The following JavaScript- and Perl-compatible regular expression is an implementation of the above definition.

/^[a-zA-Z0-9.!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?(?:\.[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?)*$/


Which as resulted in bugs like 791069 against Firefox by users expecting a valid eMail address to be a valid eMail address: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791069

If you want to fix this locally, so it actually serves its purpose, I've got two patches you can apply locally: http://matt.wronka.org/stuff/projects/icpp/mozilla/

The second is the more-correct patch, and will also help if you happen to have a non-ASCII local part. It sounds like even with this applied, if you have a long domain name (more than 63 characters) Mozilla might complain but I haven't verified this, just looked at the comments in the code and bugzilla.

RFC Ignorant
[22:26:20] matt [wronka.org]/Trip RFC Ignorant, a real-time blacklist clearinghouse for domains which feel they don't need to be good citizens on the Internet in order to operate eMail, has decided to quit the game.

http://RBL.saverpigeeks.com/ has been providing a black list service for domains who though they were too good to to accept mail from other users on the Ineternet for some time now, so it seemed natural to expand and start accepting requests for the lists formerly run by RFC Ignorant. To ease transition, we've imported the final zone files from RFC Ignorant, and they can now be queried directly by removing the hyphen from the old domains, e.g. example.com.postmaster.rfc-ignorant.org now becomes example.com.postmaster.rfcignorant.org; although for future use I'd ask that you use the domain rfc-clueless.org rather than rfcignorant.org, as we don't have any directly relation with the old service other than serving the same purpose they previously did.