Opened 16 months ago

Closed 16 months ago

Last modified 16 months ago

#34753 closed Uncategorized (invalid)

Document how to properly escape `to` in email messages

Reported by: Sylvain Fankhauser Owned by: nobody
Component: Documentation Version: 4.2
Severity: Normal Keywords:
Cc: Triage Stage: Unreviewed
Has patch: no Needs documentation: no
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: no
Easy pickings: no UI/UX: no

Description

The documentation about sending email (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/email/) only provides examples with recipients being only e-mail addresses, without the recipient name. I believe adding the name of the recipient to the To header is a standard practice, and I think Django could provide some guidance on how to escape it properly since it can easily be misused.

For example, a naive way of doing it would be to use f"{first_name} {last_name} <{email}>" (which will fail if first_name, last_name or email contain special characters such as <, >, " or ,. I’m actually guilty of using this in the past, only to find out at my own expense that this wasn’t a good idea). Another way would be to pass the result of sanitize_address((f"{first_name} {last_name}", email), "utf-8") to the to argument, which would work until someone has a name that’s long enough for sanitize_address to add a \n character in the middle, resulting in an error when sanitize_address will be called a second time when actually sending the mail.

I’m still not entirely sure of the proper way to do it properly (and I’m actually surprised I couldn’t find anything about this online). I think the proper way to do it would be to pass the result of email.utils.formataddr((f"{first_name} {last_name}", email)) to the to argument. If you think that’s the correct way to do it and you think the docs could be improved by adding a note about this, I can take care of submitting a patch.

Change History (2)

comment:1 by Mariusz Felisiak, 16 months ago

Resolution: invalid
Status: newclosed

Thanks for the ticket, however it's rather a support question. Django is not a mail server and we cannot document all related caveats, best practices, and how-to's.

Closing per TicketClosingReasons/UseSupportChannels.

comment:2 by Claude Paroz, 16 months ago

I would not be so categorical, I think that this is a common use case and a note in the docs wouldn't hurt. Maybe the note would simply redirect to an external reference (Python docs or RFC).

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