At 2:55 PM -0400 7/12/00, Dave Sill wrote:
>"Tom Neff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>Yes, this appears to be a BestServ software problem.
>
>Let's rehash. BestServ is using an authentication mechanism that is
>RFC legal and has worked for years. Recently, AOL has started munging
>messages in a way that breaks BestServ's authentication. Therefore,
>the problem "appears to be a BestServ software problem"?
They did it to solve a different problem -- and they did it in a way
that's STILL RFC legal. So is the problem that AOL changed it? Or is
it that BestServ isn't sufficiently flexible to deal with reasonable
changes? Assuming the change is reasonable.
As someone who runs lists for a living, and someone who has written a
number of them (and hacked on others), in all honesty, if you write a
mail server that requires non-munging and is inflexible in reading
returned mail that might be tweaked in some way, the mail server is
at fault. This is, FWIW, a flaw in majordomo, too, since it's
horribly intolerant of even trivial munging, including line-wrapping
of the AUTH line in mailback validations.
Is it Eudora's fault that it wordwraps to 75 characters and breaks
majordomo's auth lines? Or is it majordomo's fault for not for not
recognizing that this stuff happens and needs to be considered?
Same problem: return mail is munged. Differnt reasons, but same
problem. IMHO, in both cases, the list server software is making
assumptions that aren't save to assume. the BestServ server has a
BETTER case than Majordomo, but basically, it comes down to "is AOL's
change a bug, or is this simply a bug in the BestServ software that
wasn't tickled before now?". the more I look at this, the more I see
it as the latter.
>I can't *believe* anyone would honestly argue that BestServ is in the
>wrong here, but at the very least, it's a "BestServ and AOL
>incompatibility problem".
I can, I will, and just did. Because with e-mail, assuming stuff
isn't going to be changed is always going to end up failing at some
point, if only because you can't trust end users to follow directions
properly all the time and/or not make typoes along the way. One
wonders how well BestServ handles international character sets and
the like, too, since those are likely to munch stuff up, or encode it
as well...
>
> >and when you Reply, BestServ wants to see _exactly_ that string in the
>>Subject, or no dice. That's a silly thing to do
>
>No, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. They have every right
>to expect their messages to be delivered intact.
I think it's a lot more reasonable in the Subject line than in the
body, but even subject line munging is an accepted practice, because
MLMs do it on a regular basis.
>How would you feel if Microsoft "fixed" the Outlook virus problem by
>munging MIME headers and turning binary attachments into unreadable
>text?
It sure is an improvement over executing the viruses like they do
now... (chortle)
> >- they should have used a
>>regexp scannable ID string and look for it in subject or body ignoring
>>delimiters.
>
>Kindly propose a "regexp scannable ID string" that's guaranteed not to
>mungable by AOL now or any time in the future, given that AOL feels
>free to munge anything necessary to "protect their users".
Actually, a better option is to use a delimiter scheme that isn't
likely to be misinterpreted by someone else looking for delimiters.
Using angle brackes for ANYTHING these days is problematic, unless
it's tied down unambiguously by an RFC. And with angle brackets, so
many things are doing stuff to HTML these days that it's a matter of
time before someone gets confused and messes you up. The delimiters
are badly chosen here
>Sure, but that's missing the point: AOL broke it, AOL should fix it.
AOL made a change to deal with soem other problem, which had this
side effect. It's completely unclear that AOL "ought" to fix this,
because we don't know the impact of the fix and why they made it.
You have a choice of breaking one of two things. Choose one. Breaking
neither isn't an option. What do you do? take the break of lesser
impact. Sometimes, you CAN'T solve everything for everyone, after
all. Life is like that.
>Sheesh.
agreed, sort of.
--
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"
