From: Shanti Braford <shanti@...>
Date: 2006-11-10T00:52:17+09:00
Subject: Best way to parse email recipient lists?

Hey all,

So... I'm trying to parse email recipient lists (entered by hand into 
the "to", "cc" and "bcc" fields of a mail app by users).

These can obviously come in a wild variety of formats, and I'd like to 
support as many as possible.

The other gotcha - is that I'd like to keep as much name metadata 
available as possible.

Using TMail's parser - I was under the impression that the name portion 
in the "to", "cc", "bcc" fields gets stripped, down to an array of email 
addresses.  (i.e. otherwise we could use just TMail - please let me know 
if this is incorrect or if there's a work around)

Here are a few example scenarios (from relatively easy to a little 
harder):
raw.uncooked@sushi.co.jp
mr.techie+nospam@gmail.com
<raw@hotmail.com>
"Bob Smith" <bob@smith.org>
Bob Smith <bob@smith.org>
"Jones, Craig" <craig.jones@corp.com>
"Summer Thomas" <sum49@aol.com>; "Al Franken" <al@dnc.org>
"Clinton, Bill" <bill@whitehouse.gov>; "Obama, Barack" 
<barack@senate.gov>; "Jenny McCarthy" <jenny@spike.com>
Bob <bob@accounting.com>, <jessica@email.com>, James Blunt 
<james@blunt.org>

etc...

Any ideas?

I've been working up RegEx's like crazy but my RegEx foo isn't quite 
what it used to be.  Are there any shortcuts, or do I need one big RegEx 
many specific ones to match the various scenarios?

We're currently using this RegEx to detect when we have a single 
properly formatted address (w/o a name attached):
http://tfletcher.com/lib/rfc822.rb
...but that's only one small portion of the problem.

- Shanti

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