I’ve just discovered that if someone uses the “Forgotten your username or password?” option then their email is case sensitive. As a lot of emails have been imported then sometimes the last name is capitalised, sometimes not and other permutations.
As most people don’t worry about case sensitivity for emails is this behaviour correct, can it be switched off/amended at all?
Rob
Hi Rob,
Technically according to the original email specifications the first part of an email address, the bit before the @, is actually supposed to be case sensitive. In practice most people expect emails to be case-insensitive.
They've been debating what to do about this over at Moodle for 2.5 years now!
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-29315
Do many people come across problems here? There are the standard Moodle user tools then we have things like Sync also dealing with accounts so we'd need to be consistent everywhere.
Hi Ciaran,
From our point of view it would be much better if the email address was case-insensitive, there are all sorts of anomalies on our databases in relation to email addresses for staff.
Steph
I would definitely agree, I wasn't aware of this but I can see how it may have been causing problems to our staff when trying to reset their password, etc. Maybe a good compromise would be a configuration option to treat email addresses as case-insensitive or not, because as the Moodle discussion illustrates there are those who want standards compliance and those who want things to actually work in the real world. That feels a bit "Microsoft" to say that, but in this case a lot of email systems do seem to treat local-part as case-insensitive.
Dan
Yeah I agree in the real world most people assume emails are case-insensitive.
Moodle don't seem to be in any hurry to resolve this but I'll file an enhancement request for Totara and we'll see if we can figure out the best way to implement this.
May be a problem with existing data as the email address is supposed to be unique but as it is currently case sensitive Joe.Bloggs@org.com and joe.bloggs@org.com would currently be seen as two distinct addresses - so we might also need a tool for cleaning up existing data.
