[CentOS] login case sensitivity

Thu Sep 7 20:26:50 UTC 2017
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On 7 September 2017 at 16:07, Alexander Dalloz <ad+lists at uni-x.org> wrote:
> Am 07.09.2017 um 20:07 schrieb hw:
>>
>> Gordon Messmer wrote:
>>>
>>> On 09/07/2017 08:11 AM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>>>>
>>>> This was always
>>>> problematic because DNS hostnames and email addresses in the RFC
>>>> standards were case insensitive
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Not quite.  SMTP is required to treat the "local-part" of the RCPT
>>> argument as case-sensitive, and to preserve case when relaying mail.  The
>>> destination is allowed to treat addresses according to local policy, but in
>>> general SMTP is case sensitive with regard to the user identifier.
>>
>>
>> Last time I checked, RFCs said that local parts *should not* be case
>> sensitive,
>> and cyrus defaulted to treat them case sensitive, which is a default that
>> usually
>> needs to be changed because senders of messages tend to not pay any
>> attention to
>> the case sensitiveness of recipient addresses at all, which then confuses
>> them like
>> any other error.
>
>
> The relevant part from the RFC:
>
> https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5321.txt
>
> 2.4.  General Syntax Principles and Transaction Model
>
>    Verbs and argument values (e.g., "TO:" or "to:" in the RCPT command
>    and extension name keywords) are not case sensitive, with the sole
>    exception in this specification of a mailbox local-part (SMTP
>    Extensions may explicitly specify case-sensitive elements).  That is,
>    a command verb, an argument value other than a mailbox local-part,
>    and free form text MAY be encoded in upper case, lower case, or any
>    mixture of upper and lower case with no impact on its meaning.  The
>    local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive.
>    Therefore, SMTP implementations MUST take care to preserve the case
>    of mailbox local-parts.  In particular, for some hosts, the user
>    "smith" is different from the user "Smith".  However, exploiting the
>    case sensitivity of mailbox local-parts impedes interoperability and
>    is discouraged.  Mailbox domains follow normal DNS rules and are
>    hence not case sensitive.
>

Thanks for the clarification to my original email. I misremembered
RFC821 and thought it was for the entire part..

   Commands and replies are not case sensitive.  That is, a command or
   reply word may be upper case, lower case, or any mixture of upper and
   lower case.  Note that this is not true of mailbox user names.  For
   some hosts the user name is case sensitive, and SMTP implementations
   must take case to preserve the case of user names as they appear in
   mailbox arguments.  Host names are not case sensitive.





> Alexander
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.