Symptoms

When working with user names that contain special characters, (such as "@" and "#") you may receive the following message:

User <test%45test.com> does not exist

Cause

Crowd is behind a reverse proxy, and a RewriteRule exists to alter the URL (perhaps to go from http to https) in some form:

RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

The special characters are being encoded, and being double encoded again by the reverse proxy.

Resolution

Add the NoEncode to the RewriteRule, to ensure that the Rewrite is not being double encoded.

The example above becomes:

RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,NE,L]