Following up on my own message...
Aaron Nabil writes...
>D. J. Bernstein writes...
>>Aaron Nabil writes:
>>> The message in question had a "bare LF" in it, perfectly legal,
>>
>>Bare LFs are now categorically prohibited by 822bis. They were never
>>handled correctly by sendmail. The client's behavior is inexcusable.
>
>I guess not having access to 822bis, I'll have to ask for clarification.
>
>Are bare LF's themselves prohibited? Or is it the treating of bare
>LF's as line terminators that is prohibited?
I found draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt, which seems to be the
822bis-in-progress.
2.3. Body
The body of a message is simply lines of US-ASCII characters. The only
two limitations on the body are as follows:
- CR and LF MUST only occur together as CRLF; they MUST NOT appear
independently in the body.
which would seem to address the question of 822bis messages. But
my question about MIME messages still remains, the draft goes on
to read...
- Lines of characters in the body MUST be limited to 998 characters, and
SHOULD be limited to 78 characters, excluding the CRLF.
Note: As was stated earlier, there are other standards documents,
specifically the MIME documents [RFC-2045, RFC-2046, RFC-2048, RFC-2049]
that extend this standard to allow for different sorts of message
bodies. Again, these mechanisms are beyond the scope of this document.
My question about 8BITMIME messages remains. Would a bare LF be
legal? I'm not suggesting that a bare LF be treated a line terminator.
In any case, I'm not sure where 822bis sits on the standards track, but
wouldn't it be reasonable to require an MTA to interopertate with MTAs
that are following real, published, approved RFCs like RFC-822 and
RFC-1652?
Thanks,
--
Aaron Nabil
