Chuq Von Rospach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Since I just added de-mime to my new server, you sure won't see me
>saying they should leave the message alone. Stripping all mime but
>the plaintext is a much bigger "thing" than tweaking like they do,
>and if you think about it, everyone who runs a server that adds
>subject line id's is doing that, too.
Mailing lists are a special case. The message is delivered twice
(first to the list address, then to the recipients), and potentially
munged between the deliveries. So it can be argued that the first
message and the second message need not be identical. Certainly
RFC821/822 don't prevent the actions of list managers.
Point-to-point e-mail should be sacred though. What I send you should
be delivered to you intact. If you choose to demime it or filter out
naughty words, that's up to you. AOL's millions of users have no
control over the message munging they're doing--other than by
switching ISP's, which is a very high price to expect users to pay.
>True. I'm not saying they're right. I think this is simply one of
>those cases where two independent groups have done things that simply
>don't interoperate properly. There's no "right" or "wrong", and it
>sure isn't fun being in the middle. but it's a fact of life in the
>e-mail world that these things happen.
I disagree. It's wrong for AOL to unnecessarily break BestServ's
authentication mechanism, along with whatever else their heavy-handed
munging breaks.
If their software implements dangerous HTML-like extensions, they
should either fix their software or restrict their munging to such
HTML-like constructs that actually pose a threat.
It's irelevant that this is AOL, except that by being the 800 lb
gorilla, they'll probably get away with it.
-Dave
