Re: [Nmh-workers] quotes in personal names

[Neil W Rickert]

Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote on Dec 14, 2003:

>> MS Outlook (and maybe other mailers) inserts double quotes around the
>> personal names in header lines, like this:

>>     From: "Nobody Special" <address@hidden>

>> Unfortunately, the current version of nmh doesn't remove these quotes,
>> so they appear in the output of 'scan,' which is irritating.  I fixed
>> this for my nmh by hacking fmt_scan.c so that the friendly() command
>> removes the double quotes. 

>> Is there an "offical" way to remove the quotes already present in nmh?
>> If not, I can send a patch for fmt_scan.c to do it.

>Are the double quotes considered special by any relevant RFC?  If they

If the header were

        From: "Nobody Q. Special" <address@hidden>

then the quotes would have been required.  There are restrictions
on what can appear unquoted in

        comment <address>

and "." is one of the restricted characters.

Check the definition of "phrase" in RFC 2822

word            =       atom / quoted-string

phrase          =       1*word / obs-phrase

 -NWR