New Message: Lost Passwords in Manila Weblogs

[webmaster at userland.com]

A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$479

By: Rogers Cadenhead (rcade at yahoo.com)

I ran into an issue on Buzzword.Com [1] that prevented a user from requesting a forgotten password.

The user set his e-mail address in the Email Confirmation Sender preference (Prefs, Confirmation) using the form "Electric Dirt Farmer <edf at example.com>". On my Windows 2000 server, the SMTP service refused
to accept this as a From address when delivering mail.

I wrote a UserTalk script to crawl all 3,000 weblogs, send an e-mail, and report back the ones that failed. I also found a few others that were bad -- "voltas at example,upe.es" (note the comma) and "Dean Landsman deanland at example.com" (note the spaces).

Apparently, the address should always be simply user at domain with no spaces, "<", ">", "(", or ")" characters. Because this setting can lock a user out of a weblog if the password is lost, it would be a good idea to use regex, if possible, to verify an e-mail address is in the proper form when saving that setting.

Full explanation [2]

[1] http://www.buzzword.com/
[2] http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/2004/07/05.html#a1817