Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 10:35:29 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <199709161435.KAA27861@raptor.research.att.com>
From: Tom Scola <tscola@research.att.com>
To: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Semantics of Folding white-space inside quoted-string


We have been receiving mail with attachments from Microsoft Exchange
users with the following structure:

	X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.0.1458.49)
	Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----
	    =_NextPart_000_01BCC279.9FFB9E30"

	------ =_NextPart_000_01BCC279.9FFB9E30
	Content-Type: text/plain

Which most of our UAs fail to parse.

The question is whether or not the FWS inside the quoted-string gets
interpreted as a single space or not.  RFC822 was decidedly ambiguous
on the subject (from Section 3.4.5):

	Therefore, the
        official  semantics  do  not  "see" any bare CRLFs that are in
        quoted-strings; however particular parsing programs  may  wish
        to  note  their presence.  For such programs, it would be rea-
        sonable to interpret a "CRLF LWSP-char" as being a CRLF  which
        is  part  of the quoted-string; i.e., the CRLF is kept and the
        LWSP-char is discarded.  

However, draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt-02 has nothing to say on the
subject, other than that the normal folding rules apply (Section
3.2.6):

	Since a quoted-string is allowed to contain FWS, folding
	is permitted.

So I take that as meaning that the above header *might* be illegal
under RFC822, but it is definitely legal under RFC822bis.  Right?