Mutt sometimes changes the order of realname and address when displaying "From: " headers

[cri]

If a message contains a "From: " header like this:

From: user@… (Real Name)

(i.e. with realname in parenthesis)

Mutt displays the "From: " line like this (in the index and message view):

From: Real Name <user@…>

I suspect that using parentheses is not RFC-compliant, and mutt does its best to display the header line in a better way, but doing so may confuse the user who is trying to write a filter expression to match the From: header (e.g. a procmail rule) and relies on what mutt displays.

Maybe it would be useful to let the user disable this behaviour via a configuration option (e.g. displaying the header "as is").

A couple of notes:

• I'm using Mutt 1.5.17+20080114 Debian package
• I didn't check if this happens also for other headers, only noticed in "From: "

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 08:31:17AM -0000, Mutt wrote:
>  I suspect that using parentheses is not RFC-compliant,
>
in fact, it is. mutt is just normalizing the address for various
reasons. not sure - does the full header view do this as well?

[pdmef]

This is a known feature and works like this for years. This feature is called "exact address" and is a compile-time feature, look for EXACT_ADDRESS in the output of 'mutt -v'.

The reason this is a compile-time option is that it wastes lots of memory and is in general not useful. Mutt needs to decode the From: header into name and address to check e.g. for your alternate addresses, index display, patterns etc.

For the pager, it generates a From: header out of this internal representation. In order to display the original header, mutt needs to keep the full original line around in addition to the decoded one.

To solve this problem, you can pipe the message through "less" to see its raw contents.

[cri]

Replying to pdmef:

This is a known feature and works like this for years. This feature is called "exact address" and is a compile-time feature, look for EXACT_ADDRESS in the output of 'mutt -v'.

...

Thank you very much for the explanation. Maybe it would be helpful to add a brief reference to this in the manual (maybe in the section documenting regexps or patterns?).

[pdmef]

(In [9a229c41e980]) Document exact address in the manual (closes #3050)