Thus spake Lyndon Nerenberg: > > On 2012-02-07, at 7:37 AM, Oliver Kiddle wrote: > > > But do you really think that > > should be the only resort when badly formed mail arrives? I'd prefer to > > see what was intended by the sender. > > Yes, I do :-( QP and Base64 (and MIME in general) have been around for nea= > rly two decades now. If the sender can't get it right, too bad. And reall= > y, the only time I see that sort of cruft is from spamming software. > > But ultimately, you cannot guess what the sender intended. Did they intend= > to send 8859? If so, why that exception character in the midst of what is = > otherwise valid QP? Does the encoder have a bug? It would seem unlikely i= > n this day and age. The alternatives are someone hand-editing the encoded = > message content =96 in which case I won't even try to guess what they meant= > - or the more likely scenario of someone trying to attack your M[STU]A by = > botching the MIME parser. And never rule out sunspots; cosmic ray memory b= > it flips *do* happen. > > Postel's maxim about being liberal about what you except meant "don't crash= > the IMP when someone sends buggy packets." It never meant "read the sende= > rs mind."
Is anyone else here an academic who's had to use ConfMaster for submitting papers to a conference? If so, maybe you've had the same experience I have: ConfMaster sends out mail with the value "ENCODING_8BIT" for the Content-Transfer-Encoding header. I've pointed out to them repeatedy that this isn't a permissible value according to RFC1521, and that it makes their notification emails unreadable in some email clients---to no avail. I would love to be able to prevail upon them to fix this or to dump all such nonconforming mail in the bin. That said, when I get mail from ConfMaster, it tends to be mail that I need to read, so I appreciate it when nmh can take a guess and perhaps show me some not-too-garbled text. (In this particular case, 'show' just barfs, sadly.) My suggestion, then, is this: Could we both have some indication that the input is bad, *and* have nmh make an attempt at interpreting it? I appreciate knowing when I have bad input; otherwise, I can't crusade for internet hygiene. But I also appreciate being able to read malformed, yet important messages. -- J. _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
