On 8 Sep 2003 at 13:45, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > I'm looking for guidance on the best practice when handling syntactically
> > invalid message id's in FETCH ENVELOPE responses.
>
> "message id's"? What is it that belongs to the message-id in question?
> Did you mean "message ids"? :)
Pedant. :-) But you're right, of course; my fingers were faster than my
mind on this occasion.
> > I'm *assuming* that the best practice in a situation like this is for me (the
> > server) to report NIL for the message-id field when the field is not
> > syntactically valid, but would appreciate feedback from on high.
>
> If you do this, then surely you should do the same for invalid Date:
> headers, invalid addresses in From:/To:/Cc: headers, etc?
If a side-effect is that the mail client used by something like 80% of all
Internet users messes up and starts deleting the wrong messages, then
yes, perhaps I should.
> I don't think that the IMAP server should be munging the mail in any
> way. If you want to either reject or correct invalid email, you should
> probably do so once, before putting the mail into the mail store -- not
> each time the mail in question is viewed.
In an ideal world I'd agree with you, but the simple reality is that people
are going to come to me and ask me to fix it: explaining to them that
their client is at fault will simply make them go out and get a different
server.
Cheers!
-- David --
------------------ David Harris -+- Pegasus Mail ----------------------
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