Extended characters and a comma in sender's Display Name may cause problems

SYMPTOMS

Users who have an extended character AND a comma in their display name may find that external recipients cannot reply by pressing the Reply button, or internal mail may not get delivered to the recipient's mailbox. This will only occur if Exclaimer has modified the email, usually by adding a disclaimer or signature.

This may affects organizations with Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 SP1, and typically affects users whose Display Name is in Surname, Forename format and where their name contains an accented or other extended character.

CAUSE

Microsoft CDO for Exchange supplied with Exchange 2000 with "August 2004 Exchange 2000 Server Post-Service Pack 3 Update Rollup" or Exchange 2003 Service Pack 1 malforms the sender address when it is has the characteristics shown above.

RESOLUTION

Microsoft knowledgebase article 886757 describes this problem and provides information for obtaining a hotfix.

We have tested the hotfix in our labs and found that it fixes the symptoms described above. However, in our tests we found that it was necessary to restart the Exchange Information Store service after making the change to the registry required by the hotfix, in order for the fix to take effect.
Alternatively, if the display name is changed to Forename Surname format the problem should not occur due to the absence of the comma.

MORE INFORMATION

Exclaimer uses CDO to manage messages when in transit through the Exclaimer system. This component has the problems identified in this article.
Details
Exclaimer uses the CDO object to parse an RFC822 email message that comes from Exchange. The sender & recipient information is encoded in the MIME header according to the scheme outlined in RFC2047. After this parsing, any Sender/Recipient that has accented characters in the name will not work correctly as the quotation marks that should be around the correspondent are not present, so consequently when CDO writes this message back after the disclaimer has been applied, the message is in an incorrect format.

APPLIES TO

• Exclaimer 2.x
• Exclaimer 3.x
• Exclaimer 4.x
  
  when used with
• Exchange 2000 with "August 2004 Exchange 2000 Server Post-Service Pack 3 Update Rollup"
• Exchange 2003 Service Pack 1

Article ID: 20050312
Last Reviewed: 9th December 2005
Revision: 1.03