Re: send-email garbled header with trailing doublequote in email

On Wed, Nov 02, 2016 at 11:29:01PM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

So this must be postfix then that out of the blue decided to garble it
in a strange way while parsing the input... The removal of all
whitespaces s/what ever/whatever/ especially I've no idea how it
decided to do so.

Can you reproduce with postfix as sendmail at least? If you can
reproduce also see what happens if you add another --to.

Yes, I can easily reproduce without using git at all by installing
postfix in local-delivery mode and running:

sendmail peff@sigill.intra.peff.net <<\EOF
From: Jeff King <redacted>
To: "what ever" " <redacted>
Subject: patch

This is the body
EOF

Many MTAs do this kind of header-rewriting. I don't necessarily agree
with it as a general concept, but the real problem is the syntactically
bogus header. The munging that postfix does makes things worse, but I
can see why it is confused and does what it does (the whole email is
inside a double-quoted portion that is never closed, so it probably
thinks there is no hostname portion at all).

So git is possibly at fault for passing along a bogus address. OTOH, the
user is perhaps at fault for providing the bogus address to git in the
first place. GIGO. :)

I think if any change were to be made, it would be to recognize this
bogosity and either clean it up or abort. That ideally would happen via
Mail::Address so git does not have to add a bunch of ad-hoc "is this
valid rfc822" checks. Reading the manpage for that module, though, it
says:

  [we do not handle all of rfc2822]
  Often requests are made to the maintainers of this code improve this
  situation, but this is not a good idea, where it will break zillions
  of existing applications.  If you wish for a fully RFC2822 compliant
  implementation you may take a look at Mail::Message::Field::Full, part
  of MailBox.

So it's possible that switching to a more robust module would improve
things.

-Peff