CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I did a bit of digging and found the cause of the problem, plus a suggested fix.

At lines 1300-1304 of CRM/Case/BAO/Case.php the contact's 'sort name' is copied into a 'display name' variable.

            if ( !CRM_Utils_Array::value('sort_name', $info) ) {
                $info['sort_name'] = $info['display_name'];   
            }
           
            $displayName = $info['sort_name'];
At line 1314 this variable is stored as the name part of the "To:" email.

                    'toName'      => $displayName,
At line 93 of CRM/Utils/Mail.php this is combined with the email address to form the "To:" header.

        $headers['To']                        = "{$params['toName']} <{$params['toEmail']}>";
There are 4 problems with the use of 'sort_name' ...

• The comma in the name confuses some MTA's. For example, Postfix replaces "Recipient, John <john.recipient@recievingdomain.com>" with "Recipient@sendingdomain.com, John <john.recipient@recievingdomain.com>" because it interprets the comma as separating two recipients, and interprets "Recipient" as a local address.
• In all other emails sent by CiviCRM, the name has the form "Firstname Lastname" rather than "Lastname, Firstname"
• It feels a bit odd to receive an email using the sort name (no one calls me "West, Ken", not even my bank!)
• The sort name is an internal construct, generated within CiviCRM

The appropriate fix is to replace lines 1300-1304 of CRM/Case/BAO/Case.php with ...

            $displayName = $info['display_name'];

Xavier,

I don't think the solution should be sought with Postfix. The problem is to do with compliance with the email address format specified in RFC 5322 (Internet Message Format). I suggest a location for the fix at the bottom of this post.

In Section 3.4.1 of that RFC the address can be of the form ...

   name-addr       =   [display-name] angle-addr

... with an optional display name (the address itself must be between angle brackets). The display name is a 'phrase' and Section 3.2.5 allows a phrase to be one or more words, and a word is an atom or a quoted string ...

   word            =   atom / quoted-string

   phrase          =   1*word / obs-phrase

Section 3.2.3 says an 'atom' is a string of text surrounded by white space which doesn't contain the following special characters ...

   specials        =   "(" / ")" /        ; Special characters that do
                       "<" / ">" /        ;  not appear in atext
                       "[" / "]" /
                       ":" / ";" /
                       "@" / "\" /
                       "," / "." /
                       DQUOTE

So, boiling that all down, the display name should be quoted if it contains any of these special characters (DQUOTE is a double quote  " ).

Lines 107 and 112 of CRM/Utils/Mail.php for 3.3.2 indicate that some issues have been detected with 'From' addresses, with CRM-6977 and CRM-7053 recently being applied. I note that the fix for CRM-7053 doesn't deal with all the 'special characters'.

The 'To' address should be simpler to fix than the 'From' address as CRM_Utils_Mail::send() is 'constructing' it rather than 'repairing' it. The 'Cc' and 'Bcc' addresses should have the same fix applied as the 'From' address.

Ken

Magic!