> From: Neil W Rickert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 07:13:12 -0500
>
> > 2. RFC822 allows the NUL character in header field-bodies. Code
> > written around the C string functions won't handle this of course.
> > Does this ever occur in real life or might it happen some day?
>
> Both "sendmail" and the version of "mail.local" distributed with the
> current sendmail handle NUL correctly. I have (once) received a
> message with NUL characters. MH, and most other unix software,
> bungles this because of the problem you mention with the C string
> functions.
>
> This is usually not a serious problem in practice. But mostly we
> won't notice, since the NULs will disappear from our mail.
A long time ago (mid 80's), I was in an environment where most of the
computers were Lisp Machines with a small number of Unix systems. In the Lisp
Machine character set, there was a bullet character which seemed to have an
ASCII value of 0. Fairly often, LispM users would send email with bullets and
the Unix users would all complain because the lines with the bullets in them
would appear blank.
The problem was that everything between the NUL and the end of the line
disappeared during line processing. I have no idea if this was sendmail or
the MUA that did this, and I have no idea if anybody has bothered to fix this
problem in the time since. The best fix you could come up with would be to
strip the NULs, I suspect.
> >Now, I recognize that this stuff is sort of covered by the NETWORK-SPECIFIC
> >TRANSFORMATIONS section of RFC822 but I have trouble believing that any
> >*NIX mail system actually does it. Is this true?
>
> Certainly "sendmail" does conversions between network line termination
> and unix line termination. I would assume that most other MTAs
> do likewise.
I've seen mail-generating scripts that don't do this transformation, and if
the SMTP server that they're sending to is sendmail, they never notice the
problem. Other MTAs such as qmail actually barf on such broken mail.
Apparently, NT mail systems fair even worse.
Chris
--
Chris Garrigues http://www.DeepEddy.Com/~cwg/
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