Snorre's Blog

Hi

Found a serious bug in .net 3.5 sp1 today concerning email addresses and international characters. The class MailAddressCollection used in MailMessage has a nice overload Add(string) which parses comma separated email addresses and creates MailAddress objects of these. A very nice thought.

When passing email addresses with international characters, this method throws an 'System.FormatException'. For example:

Normalbakke, Sølvi <solvi.normalbakke@abc.de>,"ulv, Per" <per.ulv@def.gh>

fails...

while

Luth, trude <trude.luth@abc.de>, Larsen, Kamuf <kamuf.larsen@ping.pong>

works.

The strange thing is that this code works correctly. No Exceptions...

MailAddress m = new MailAddress("Normalbakke, Sølvi <solvi.normalbakke@abc.de>").

I made this piece of ugly code to circumvent the bug. I know that there probably is a nasty regex that can do this more nicely, but the fact that you can have more or less any character in the display name of the address, makes this too hard to bother with. I spent an hour trying, without any success at least... Feel free to comment and improve.

                MailAddressCollection coll = new MailAddressCollection();
                string[] emails ="Normalbakke, Sølvi <solvi.normalbakke@abc.de>,\"ulv, Per\" <per.ulv@def.gh>".Split(',');
                for (int i = 0; i < emails.Length; i++)
                {
                    MailAddress address = null;
                    try
                    {
                        address = new MailAddress(emails[i]);
                    }
                    catch
                    {
                        address = new MailAddress(emails[i] + "," + emails[i + 1]);
                        i++;
                    }
                    coll .Add(address);
                }

The fact that MailAddress parses correctly, but not MailAddressCollection makes me think that the developers has duplicated some really closely related code here. tsk tsk...

Snorre Garmann