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Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 15:01:03 -0800
To: djb@koobera.math.uic.edu (D. J. Bernstein)
From: Pete Resnick <presnick@qualcomm.com>
Subject: Re: Message format document outline
Cc: drums@cs.utk.edu

On 3/7/96 at 12:01 PM, D. J. Bernstein wrote:

>> Invisible continuation lines must not be generated.  There then
>> becomes no requirement on how they are recognized or interpreted.
>
>This is incompatible with existing practice. Yes, it's unfortunate that
>such messages exist, but they do, and an 822bis parser shouldn't choke
>on a valid 822 message. Mail messages stick around forever.

If "choking" on the message simply means "crashing and burning or failing
with some sort of error code", I agree that this should not occur. Of
course, calling something illegal doesn't mean that you are thereby granted
license to so choke. However:

>I suggest must-not-generate-but-must-interpret-properly.

The problem with "must-interpret-properly" part is that you are making it a
requirement to treat continuation lines consisting totally as whitespace as
continuation lines. Unfortunately, there are some "hopelessly broken
mailers" out there (to borrow a phrase) which seem unable to generate
CRLF-CRLF as the seperator between message and body, and instead generate
CRLF-SPACE-CRLF. According to the rule as you have it written, we would be
*required* to interpret these as continuations, this treating the entire
message as one big header. This makes many of our users less than thrilled,
so we simply treat CRLF-SPACE-CRLF as the header/body seperator. Albeit
broken mailer's we're dealing with, it would be rather hostile to make our
behavior to deal with such things illegal.

That's why I like the grammar John has now.

pr

--
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick@qualcomm.com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated
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