CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

civiCRM converts all local-parts of email addresses (the part before the @) to lowercase.

This means that we can't use the CRM to send mails to people who have servers that are case sensitive and local-part emails that contain capitals

This means half the schools in our area. We are an education-business partnership charity. More and more businesses are doing it as well.

This is particularly difficult as we use Organic Groups linked with civiCRM to manage much of our interaction between volunteers and schools.

In the past I have been able to get the one or two e-mails changed but that really isn't an option now that it numbers hundreds and so on.

Lobo has stated elsewhere that the reason is to enable searching on e-mail fields.

How can I change this without breaking things?


PS - this behaviour of civiCRM contravenes the standard:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-2.4 states:

 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.


Does anyone have any ideas?

we did this change a few years ago based on the recommendation from someone in the community. We also interpreted the RFC wrongly, and assumed that it is case insensitive

At this point, i dont think there is an easy solution. We'll basically need to revert the fix made a few years back and also go back and fix search. If we had to redo it, we'd probably make it a config option and allow users to specify they want to retain case

If you are interested in working on this patch, please contact us on IRC

lobo

I do hope I didn't piss anyone off on the IRC channel just now! I have meetings to get to now, but over the weekend I shall:

• read up more on IRC
• have another go at sorting out the upgrade from 3.1.1
• get a development / debug environment up and running
• start looking at the code to begin understanding

Please direct as appropriate!