mail-extract-address-components vs gnus-...

[Justin Sheehy <justin@linus.mitre.org>]

I have come across a few cases where gnus-extract-address-components
will DTRT when returning the full name part of a From: header, but
mail-extract-address-components does not.

Admittedly, these addresses are not stricly correct; the full name
should be quoted.  However, in the spirit of being strict in what you
produce and liberal in what you accept, I submit that
gnus-extract-address-components is the more correct function.

An example:

(gnus-extract-address-components "Dave & Becca <fte@montyweb.com>")
("Dave & Becca" "fte@montyweb.com")

(mail-extract-address-components "Dave & Becca <fte@montyweb.com>")
("Dave Fte Becca" "fte@montyweb.com")

The former is obviously what is intended to be seen.  The latter does
not deal well with this slightly malformed address.

This is being sent to bug-gnu-emacs because I think that th
emaintainers of Emacs ought to consider either incorporating the
function from Gnus or at least amending the one in mail-extr to deal
properly with this sort of thing.

This is being sent to info-bbdb because mail-extr is distributed and
heavily used by BBDB.  I would suggest that if the suggested change is
not made in Emacs, then gnus-bbdb-summary-get-author should be changed
to use gnus-extract-address-components instead of
mail-extract-address-components, a simple drop-in change as far as I
can see.  To save myself the annoyance of seeing such mangled names, I
have already patched my copy of BBDB to do this.

This is being sent to ding because... well, because.

-- 
Justin Sheehy

In a cloud bones of steel.