bug#16946: 24.3; Rmail behaviour with a username containing "@"

[Robert Thorpe]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> writes:
>
>> My webspace provider gives usernames that are email addresses.  So, the
>> username for the smtp, pop and imap servers for this email address is 
>> "rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com".
>>
>> I can't use the character "@" in a username though, if it's sent to
>> movemail then that program will confuse what follows for the server
>> name.  I.e. if I do:-
>> (setq rmail-primary-inbox-list  
>> '("imap://rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com@myserver.com")
>> Then everything after the first @ is taken to be the server address.
>
> (This bug report unfortunately got no response at the time.)
>
> I don't use pop3 myself, so I can't really test this.  I tried looking
> in the changelog to see whethers anything has changed in this area, and
> I can't see anything in particular...  but these days, we recommend the
> system-wide movemail implementation, which may or may not have this
> limitation.
>
> Are you still seeing this issue in more recent Emacs versions?  Having
> an "@" in a user name is quote common, so it's odd that we haven't seen
> more bug reports about this if it's still an issue.

Thank you for looking at my very old bug report.

I checked it recently and the problem is still there.  Notice that it
happens on IMAP and POP3.  If you look at the code I quoted above it uses
IMAP.

I think it's caused by movemail from GNU Mailutils though.  Mailutils
can't deal with two "@" symbols (one in the username and another for the
server).  I can replicate this by using movemail on the command line
without any Emacs involvement.  I think this is a bug in mailutils.
Would you agree?  If so I'll report it.

I'm not sure that it would be possible for the Mailutils maintainers to
fix it without changing the options format for the command.  On the
other hand I think the options format really should be changed.

The kludge to fix this is to use "%40" in the email address instead of
"@".  That's what I've been using.

I don't know why it hasn't been reported again.  Perhaps few people use
Rmail and have email addresses of that sort.  Or perhaps when they found
the problem they searched the web and found the mailing list discussions
where someone gave the "%40" hack.

BR,
Robert Thorpe