Could you "pretty please" remove the gratuitous "double quotes" you put around my "name" and the "names" of all the "people" I correspond with?
To: "Honored Correspondent" <person@example.net>
Subject: "Gratuitous" double quotes
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this atrocity was introduced by Microsoft when they desperately tried to convert their legacy email software (from when completely company-internal systems were the norm) to cope with what was then the new and mysterious Internet. Regardless of its origins, this convention has no technical merit. Granted, the old RFC822 mandated the use of quotes if the real name happened to contain special characters, such as single quotes, but in this day and age, the preferred mechanism for ensuring transport-safe strings in email would be MIME encoding. So (in transport) you would have, say,
To: Honored Correspondent <person@example.net>
Cc: =?utf-8?Q?=C3=84cc=C3=ABntric_=22weird=22_=E5=81=8F=E5=BF=83?= <centric@cn.example.com>
Subject: "Gratuitous" double quotes
... but any competent MIME-aware client should transparently display this as human-readable, with the MIME jumble decoded:
To: Honored Correspondent <person@example.net>
Cc: Äccëntric "weird" 偏心 <centric@cn.example.com>
Subject: "Gratuitous" double quotes
Notice that a double quote in someone's name (as you often see with nicknames) is no longer a problem at all, and you have to have this mechanism in place anyway if you want to cope with names which are not purely 7-bit ASCII, or which happen to contain some of the the rather haphazard set of characters which are significant for the mail transport layer.
Grateful in anticipation of the day when I will no longer need to apologize for my choice of mail client,
"Just me"
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this atrocity was introduced by Microsoft when they desperately tried...
Microsoft has introduced many atrocities, but this is not one of them :-) It comes straight out of RFC 2822.
You might prefer the older RFC 822 address format, e.g.
From: jsmith@MIT.EDU (John Smith)
> Notice that a double quote in someone's name (as you often see with nicknames) is no longer a problem at all
Double quotes were never a problem. See the examples in Appendix A.1.2 of the RFC.
For my part, MIME-encoded mail header fields are a bane, because they are unsupported by many mail-handling tools (e.g. procmail).
Posted by: iSKUNK! | January 21, 2009 at 08:32 AM
Let me clarify that. I'm not saying that using double quotes is a violation of the standard or an invention by Microsoft. What I'm getting at is the superfluous double quotes which e.g. Outlook puts around every real name, as seen in my examples. By contrast, the examples in appendix A.1.2 of RFC2822 (which as you probably know has been superseded by RFC5322) do not have double quotes around names except where necessary -- and the required syntax for a literal double quote is not very elegant or usable. Even though raw MIME is not elegant or usable, either, modern end-user clients relieve users from seeing what's going on behind the scenes technically.
While I'm among the first to lament the fact that Procmail does not handle MIME natively, that's not really relevant here. Some clients do use MIME for this already, so if you want to cope with this syntax by way of a Procmail recipe, the problem exists already, and regardless, I don't think it can be considered a valid argument against persuading more MUA authors to use a convention which is friendlier on poor old Aunt Tilly's eyes and nerves.
Posted by: era | January 23, 2009 at 12:47 PM