[Django] #17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

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Jan 18, 2012, 11:19:12 AM1/18/12

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses
----------------------------------------------+----------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody
Type: Bug | Status: new
Component: Database layer (models, ORM) | Version: 1.3
Severity: Normal | Keywords: EmailField,
Triage Stage: Unreviewed | duplicates
Easy pickings: 0 | Has patch: 0
| UI/UX: 0
----------------------------------------------+----------------------------
Neither in a form or a model does the EmailField become lower case upon
saving or validating.

If this field were to be lower the validation regex would be simpler. In
addition if you have a unique constraint on this field within your model
then you are free to add te...@example.com and te...@Example.com and any
unique variant of upper/lower case characters.

Seems a bit of a short fall seeing as the EmailField does some validation
on email addresses already.

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561>
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Jan 18, 2012, 11:19:31 AM1/18/12

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------

Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody
Type: Bug | Status: new

* needs_better_patch: => 0
* needs_tests: => 0
* needs_docs: => 0

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:1>

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Jan 18, 2012, 12:24:34 PM1/18/12

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody
Type: Bug | Status: closed

Component: Database layer | Version: 1.3

(models, ORM) | Resolution: invalid

Changes (by nate_b):

* status: new => closed
* resolution: => invalid

Comment:

The problem is that test@... and tesT@... '''are''' different email
addresses. Take a look at the answers to this question
[http://stackoverflow.com/q/556090/286340 How do I upper case an email
address?], and the relevant links to the RFC.

In practice uppercase letters are discouraged, but breaking that would
probably not be a good idea.

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:2>

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Jan 19, 2012, 5:03:58 AM1/19/12

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody

Comment (by zechs.marquie@…):

I suppose its better to adhere to the RFC. Perhaps an option could be
passed to EmailField to state whether you want it to lower all case or
not. It would save having to do something in the form validation like

def clean_email(self):
return self.cleaned_data['email'].lower()

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:3>

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Jan 27, 2012, 5:11:37 PM1/27/12

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody

Comment (by lrekucki):

I'm not sure adding another option to save you 2 lines in not so common
case is a good idea.

One thing to note is that only the *local part* of the email is case
sensitive. Host names are by definition case insensitive (at least in
ASCII range, not sure about IDN), ie. {{{me...@example.com}}} and
{{{me...@Example.com}}} are the same address. IMO, doing such
normalization is useful, but it's a bit different thing then proposed on
this ticket.

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:4>

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Jan 27, 2012, 5:14:22 PM1/27/12

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody

Comment (by aaugustin):

Django shouldn't alter user input. IMO this ticket is "wontfix" anyway.

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:5>

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Jan 30, 2012, 4:35:39 AM1/30/12

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody

Comment (by zechs.marquie@…):

Well think about it this way. The ORM is something that sits between us
and the database and the database is supposed to be something we don't
want to fudge around behind the ORM's back. The database WON'T notify you
if you insert m...@example.com and m...@Example.com. For every production
site out there recording an email address, this crops up. Twitter,
Facebook, Github, Imgur, Stack overflow and Google all treat email as case
insensitive. If most email vendors enforce case insensitivity ( for
simplifying the administration ) then you will most likely want to follow
suit. Email is often stored as a unique column in a database so those two
lines are probably already very commonly hit out there.

I cannot force something into Django, but when people say email validation
of this nature is NOT common I have to DISAGREE. Its an unwritten rule
that we treat the entire email as being case insensitive for security and
ease of administration so I think the flag would be useful here. Is it a
case of us saying EmailFields operate to strict standards or saying
EmailFields accommodate a useful features out of the box.

PS Nothing anyone has said so far is incorrect. But this feature supports
both positions by making this check optional.

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:6>

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Sep 23, 2012, 10:06:14 AM9/23/12

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody

Comment (by anonymous):

Interesting, my company ran into this problem as well. We ended up having
to run a South schema migration on 2 million users, after making the
following modification:

{{{
def email_prep(self, value):
"""
Lower-cases the value returned by super, while still allowing nullable
email fields.
"""
prep_value = super(EmailField, self).get_prep_value()
if prep_value is not None:
return prep_value.lower()
return prep_value

EmailField.get_prep_value = email_prep
}}}

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:7>

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Sep 23, 2012, 10:09:46 AM9/23/12

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody

Comment (by anonymous):

Just noticed a typo - {{{prep_value = super(EmailField,
self).get_prep_value(value)}}}

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:8>

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Jul 27, 2016, 6:45:26 AM7/27/16

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody

Type: Bug | Status: closed
Component: Database layer | Version: 1.3
(models, ORM) |

Comment (by jlherren):

This is an old ticket, but since it rates very high on Google I'd like to
describe another solution that I have been using and that works great.

The relevant RFCs clearly state that the local-part of the email address
is case-sensitive, yet it is still true that many (but not all) email
providers operate in a case-insensitive manner. The problem that results
is that it allows users to register multiple accounts to my site using
various capitalization of their one and the same email address; for
example they can register ''ME@examplecom'' as well as ''me@examplecom''.
This is something that I do not want to allow and I suppose I might not be
alone with this.

The obvious and simple solution of lower-casing all user input is
'''not''' satisfactory to me. I believe that the user's choice of how to
capitalize his/her email address should be respected and I wish to not
alter it.

My solution involves a field 'normalized_email' which lower-cases the
email (or applies other transformations) as well as an 'original_email'
field, which stores the original user input. For identification purposes
(login, registration, duplicate check) I use the normalized email, but for
display and email sending purposes I use the original email.

To make all of this work quite some extra code is necessary. Since my code
is very project specific and it's too long anyway, I can't post it here.
But here's a quick summary: A method UserManager.normalize_email() will
take care of the normalizing transformation. Overriding User.save() will
make sure to always set normalized_email to
UserManager.normalize_email(original_email) prior to saving to the
database. All forms (login form, registration form, user editing forms,
admin forms) will have to verify user input and check for duplicate
normalized emails manually.

On a side note: Some email providers are insensitive to more than just the
capitalization. For example, Gmail will ignore all dots in the email,
making john@gmailcom the same as j.o.h.n@gmailcom. To prevent the same
email address to be used for multiple accounts, further normalization is
possible.

--
Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:9>

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Dec 19, 2016, 6:20:58 PM12/19/16

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody

Comment (by Craig de Stigter):

For those using postgres, the
[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/citext.html CITEXT]
datatype does this very well. It's case sensitive for retrieval but
insensitive for comparison.

Django now has
[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/postgres/fields/#citextfield
a field for it] (1.11 dev)

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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:10>

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Jan 6, 2019, 10:30:32 AM1/6/19

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#17561: EmailField does not automatically lower the case in email addresses

-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Reporter: zechs.marquie@… | Owner: nobody

Comment (by uri-rodberg):

I also want `EmailField` in our project ([https://github.com/speedy-net
/speedy-net Speedy Net]) to be saved lowercase in the model and not only
in the forms. So for example, if we create (in a test) an object such as
`user_email_address = UserEmailAddress(user=user,
email='EM...@EXAMPLE.COM')`, I want `user_email_address.email` to be equal
to `'em...@example.com'`. This setting may be optional but I think it's
very important. And by the way, I think users who are not able to receive
email at a lowercase email address will not be able to use Speedy Net.

--
Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17561#comment:11>

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