[Mediawiki-l] external authentication

[Anthony_Fernandez at Dell.com]

There is one case that concerns me about external authenticating users;
underscore in email joe_smith at test.com <mailto:joe_smith at test.com> 
 
Mediawiki logs users by "username" and not email, this poses an
interesting challenge since our authenticating service uses emails to
authenticate. This then becomes the Wikimedia username. However
wikimedia does not like '_' in usernames.  I've tinkered a bit and I've
found all the instances of str_replace ( "_", " ", $s ), however they
are in functions that also get called with other data in $s (mostly for
display purposes) So far, so good.  It works.  But want to know if there
is a way to authenticate externally using email addresses that can be in
the form user_name at email.com?