CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#urimailto
godzilla
godzilla

Reputation: 1010

UriFormatException when using %40 instead of @ in mailto: protocol

I am writing a default mail client to handle when someone clicks mailto:[email protected]

craigslist mailto links have the form mailto:bob%40example.com
I get an exception when this is used.
here is some simple code to repeat the problem in c#

System.Uri u1 = new Uri(@"mailto:[email protected]");  // ok so far
System.Uri u2 = new Uri(@"http://somewhere.foo/profile/username%40somewhere.foo"); // still ok
System.Uri u3 = new Uri(@"mailto:bob%40ms.com");  // crash here

question 1:
shoudn't mailto:bob%40example.com be a valid uri

question 2:
if it is an invalid uri then how is outlook not crashing on it.

I am using visual studio 2012

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1082

Answers (1)

Roy Dictus
Roy Dictus

Reputation: 33139

RFC 6068 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6068.txt), which defines the mailto protocol, does not specify that %40 is a valid syntax to replace @ as a username/domain separator.

It does specify that if a username contains a @, such as in the case hello@[email protected], you can use %40 to escape it to hello%[email protected]. But nowhere does it state that hello%40domain.com would be a valid mailto URI.

And if Microsoft decided to support it in Outlook, that still doesn't change the fact that the RFC, which is authoritative, doesn't define it -- so I'd say, Microsoft probably put it in for reasons of robustness, or maybe it's a side-effect of them parsing any URI for %xx syntax...

Upvotes: 4

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