Special Characters in Email Addresses?

[robdog]

Affected version

2.x

Not sure if this is a bug report, but I have users, for some reason, that want a single quote in their email address. Is this not allowed within XenForo? Should it be allowed? (possible bug?) Or is this an enhancement request?

 

[Chris D]

This may be a bug in the email validation library that we use and I have opened an issue to address it.

Under RFC5322 and other validators I have tried, it should work fine:

Single quotes are valid according to RFC 5322 · Issue #308 · egulias/EmailValidator

If I validate an email such as: chriso'dowd@example.com It will fail with a ATEXT found after CFWS error. According to RFC 5322 and other validators that adhere to the standard, this should be vali...

github.com

 

[PaulB]

@Chris D, this isn't a bug in that library--the demo email you provided works fine, and I can't repro it with their code.

The issue is in XF's \XF\Validator\Email.php:

		if (preg_match('/["\'\s\\\\]/', $value))
		{
			// intentionally reject some odd (though technically valid) emails
			$errorKey = 'invalid';
			return false;
		}

 

[Chris D]

I’ll have another go but I explicitly tried it in that library and it failed. Admittedly I didn’t read further but that’s the point the code was stopping for me.

 

[Chris D]

Of course I've tried it again and now it works so that's cool

EDIT: Ah...

Well, we trigger the email validation twice. I think the first one is checking if the username is a valid email address as that's not something we allow. That was failing, but my test didn't go far enough to see where the real email check was failing.

 

[robdog]

@Chris D so is this something that will change in the Xenforo code to allow for these types of email addresses?

 

[Chris D]

Potentially though it was added due to security concerns.

It may depend whether the library we use for sending mail mitigates these concerns sufficiently.