Adam Bailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Whatever happened to being liberal in what you accept and conservative in
> what you send? Subject lines get mangled by bad software, screwed-up mail
> gateways, and errant users all the time. The important thing is the
> cookie. So long as it's in-tact, BestServ shouldn't care what else is in
> the subject line.
I think that there is a conceptual fallacy here that both Adam and
Chuq have fallen into, which is that once you allow that MTAs may
gratuitously munge the contents of messages in non-reversable ways,
you can *never* assure that any given token, cookie, etc., will ever be
intact after it passes through the MTA. And, unfortunately, cookies
and similar tokens need (by their nature) to be matched literally,
as do digital signatures and the like. Munging them breaks them,
unless you munge them in standard, reversible ways.
Suppose that an MTA decided that "x396" (part of the cookie
"<x396c6c83.717.tMNmXtp3>" was a reserved word, and therefore needed
to be quoted, like "\x\3\9\6", or more realistically, by turning
it into quoted-printable? (Actually, the latter, while annoying,
is probably OK for a message body since quoted-printable or base64
are standards and can be reversed, while AOL's "<." is neither.
(You can't just transform "<." into "<", since "<." might be part
of a token.)
If AOL wants to propose a transfer-encoding that transforms "<" into
"<." for its business purposes, let it do so, and publish it as a
standard and get it into MIME-compliant mail implementations, which
will then know what to do with it to preserve content. Otherwise, it
is just as broken as any software that decides to gratuitously alter
content.
--
Michael C. Berch
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
