chat: strip RFC 5322 display name when matching reply recipients

[etbyrd]

Summary

Caught while playing Zork over primitive chat as the real-user smoke test of the agent-to-agent loop. The server returns the from-header form (Zork <zork@...>) in EmailDetail.from_email, but the CLI was doing a literal string compare against the bare recipient the user typed (zork@...). Every reply from a sender that sets a display name hit:

Inbound email <id> does not match recipient <recipient>.
Error: Inbound email <id> is from Zork <zork@play.primitive-staging-1.com>,
not zork@play.primitive-staging-1.com. Use ...

Two identical addresses, rejected as different. That's basically every real service, since most set a display name. Blocks the natural primitive chat reply flow end-to-end.

Fix

normalizeEmailAddress in commands/chat.ts now strips the angle-bracket wrapper before lowercasing:

const angleMatch = value.match(/<([^>]+)>/);
const bare = angleMatch?.[1] ?? value;
return bare.trim().toLowerCase();

Bare addresses pass through unchanged, so existing callers (assertParentMatchesRecipient, findLatestInboundFromRecipient) keep working on the bare-address path AND start working on the display-name path. Exported so it can be unit-tested directly.

Bonus side effect

The chat reply printer emits canonical follow-up commands like:

primitive chat Zork <zork@play.primitive-staging-1.com> --reply '...' ...

< and > are shell redirects, so even quoting that correctly is annoying. With this fix, agents can use the bare-address form (which is what they have in args.recipient anyway) and the reply context loader matches it cleanly.

Test plan

• pnpm lint clean
• pnpm typecheck clean
• pnpm test 517/517 (added 5 cases on normalizeEmailAddress: bare round-trip, display-name strip, quoted display name, bare angle-bracket wrapper, and the round-trip identity that's the whole point of the fix)
• After merge + release: re-run the Zork repro (primitive chat zork@play.primitive-staging-1.com "open mailbox" then primitive chat reply "go north") and confirm the reply context loads cleanly.

Upstream note

There's also a server-side oddity worth a separate look: from_email and from_header both carry the display-name form on this email, while sender is bare. Naming-wise from_email reads like "bare address" but is actually "from-header form". This CLI fix papers over it; the cleaner long-term fix is making from_email actually carry the bare address. Not in scope for this PR.

Bundle in next release?

Small change, easy to roll into the next coordinated release. Could go in a 0.38.1 patch or wait for 0.39.0.

[greptile-apps]

Greptile Summary

Fixes a recipient-matching bug where normalizeEmailAddress rejected display-name-wrapped addresses (Zork <zork@example.com>) as different from the bare form (zork@example.com) typed by the user or agent, blocking the primitive chat reply flow for essentially every real service.

• normalizeEmailAddress now extracts the bare address from inside angle brackets before lowercasing; bare addresses pass through unchanged, so existing callers are unaffected.
• The function is exported and covered by five new unit tests spanning the relevant address shapes.

Confidence Score: 5/5

Safe to merge — the change is narrowly scoped to one helper function and does not alter any call sites or data flows.

The regex /<([^>]+)>/ correctly extracts the bare address on the display-name path, and the ?? value fallback keeps bare addresses working as before. Every edge case in the test suite passes. No callers were modified; they simply inherit the corrected normalisation.

No files require special attention.

Important Files Changed

Filename	Overview
cli-node/src/oclif/commands/chat.ts	Exports normalizeEmailAddress and adds RFC 5322 display-name stripping via a single regex before lowercasing; all callers benefit automatically.
cli-node/tests/oclif/chat.test.ts	Adds 5 unit tests for normalizeEmailAddress covering bare address, display-name form, quoted display name, bare angle-bracket wrapper, and the round-trip identity that is the core of the fix.

_{Reviews (1): Last reviewed commit: "Strip RFC 5322 display name when matchin..." | Re-trigger Greptile}