On 16 Jul, 2012, at 20:50, Mark Andrews wrote:
Stuart,
your mail client botched the Content-type line generation.
You may want to report it.
Content-type: image/png; x-unix-mode=0644; name=Whatis'
"?.png"=""
Content-transfer-encoding: base64
Content-disposition: inline; filename="What is ' ?.png"
Mark
Mark, your tone sounds very confident that you're absolutely certain
that you know exactly what botched what, and whose fault it is.
I'll reserve judgement until I actually know what happened, but what
I can tell you is this: Viewing the outgoing TCP packets with
tcpflow, this is what my mail client sends on-the-wire to the SMTP
relay:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: image/png;
x-unix-mode=0644;
name=What is ' ?.png
Content-Disposition: inline;
filename="What is ' ?.png"
By the time you received the email, Mark, it had been rewritten to
the form you showed. As to what intermediary (or intermediaries)
contributed to that rewriting, I do not yet know.
It's ironic that this problem occurs in the midst of a discussion of
the problems of escaping and message framing. The reality seems to be
that unless we keep things supremely simple, we can't hope to have
all programmers get it right in all cases. If there's exactly one
valid form for a string, then maybe we can hope to have that
implemented properly. When there are different representations of the
same string in different contexts, the probability of everyone
getting it right in all contexts pretty much approaches zero.
Slightly off-topic, I'm told that at least some mail clients
truncated my original email at the line "unintentionally leaked
through into the user interface."
As composed on my Mac, there was some introductory text, then two
images, then the bulk of the text, as it appears in the archive:
<http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ipv6/current/msg16128.html>
Apparently some mail clients turned the second chunk of body text
into an attachment.
I'm curious as to how widespread this issue is -- I might have to be
more careful about where I put images in my email messages in the
future.
Could people send me a quick private email saying what mail client
they use and whether it:
1. Showed the entire message as I composed it with the two images
displayed in-line (like the archive).
2. Showed the entire text of the message, but with the two images as
attachments (Gmail shows it this way).
3. Showed only the first five paragraphs of text, with the two images
and remaining text as attachments.
I'll summarize results to the list.
Stuart Cheshire
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