Create account email address check should be case-insensitive

Feature
1

to reproduce:

  1. sign up as joe@example.com
  2. sign up on same forum as JOE@EXAMPLE.COM
    expected: “sorry, that email has already been taken”
    actual: new account is created
2

Not actually a bug – mail addresses (but not domains) are case sensitive, per Wikipedia:

3

Odd. As mentioned on that article, I have always seen First.Last@example.com go to the same inbox as first.last@example.com.

So I guess while its not technically a bug, it can be problematic.

I brought this up because a new user on our forum was having trouble signing in after they were approved - and now I see they just tried to sign up again with the other case as a different user name.

4

It is due to the Robustness principle Otherwise know as Postel’s law that it works when you do that. It spread from TCP to SMTP.
From the writeup:

“TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”

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5

Personally, I think people should have to tick a very special site setting if they don’t want bob@somewhere.com to be treated exactly the same as BOB@somewhere.com

4 Likes
6

I am definitely coming around to this way of thinking.

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7

According to your link

The domain part is not case-sensitive, but local-parts may be.

So bob@example.com is strictly equivalent to bob@EXAMPLE.COM but may be different from BOB@example.com. If you really wanted case-sensitive emails you’d have to parse out the case-insensitive domain portion and compare it separately from the local parts.

According to a comment in this StackOverflow answer (emphasis mine):

‘In short, you are safe to treat email addresses as case-insensitive.’ I’d phrase it stronger: “you’re unsafe to treat email-addresses as case-sensitive manner” Especially when checking for duplicates in user-databases, etc.

Several email systems that are case-insensitive and that would cause problems if they were treated case-sensitively:

3 Likes
8

@neil is working on this next week.

1 Like
9

This problem is fixed. Email is not case sensitive anymore!

5 Likes