Hello Mr. Russell Bell.
[email protected] wrote in <[email protected]>:
| Herr Steffen Nurpmeso: 'I also realized that the behaviour
|regarding symbolic links is mentioned in the "A starter" manual
|section, which made me wonder whether you were actually asking for a
|switch to turn this behaviour off?'
| I apologize for not-reading the new man page. mail has
|supported symbolic links for some 30+ years. It hadn't occurred to me
|that it would stop. And the error message didn't point to that as
|the problem.
It is considered a security problem: "people" could trap you by
creating a symbolic link to some target, and _that_ will be
created with your personality. It likely does not matter on
single user systems, though. And in general ..
But then again there has been a security advisory a few years ago
because BSD Mail has always supported addressees like 'cat >>
/tmp/x.mbox' and '/tmp/x.mbox', and when a security researcher put
this documented feature in the context of security aspects, it
turned into a security advisory that was patched by the entire
world in a very short time (some projects were informed a month
before "disclosure", however).
I mean, sure, maybe there are really people who create a web form
and pipe the stuff directly to the sh(1)ell, or mail(1).
Under this impression, maybe there are people which really want to
trap you with symbolic links, and this software has seen two
security advisories since i maintain it, i would love to not have
another one. You know how it is, you throw with the dirt of the
sheer number of advisories, and then it takes effort to look under
that surface. Etc. And one of them was a very tough one, too.
| HSN: 'some variable to follow symbolic links would be doable;
|what do you think?'
| That would be better than nothing - I would know to use it. I
Yeah, that is always a problem. More and more switches noone knows
about. In interactive mode we could prompt instead when we
encounter a symbolic link. Maybe that is the way to go instead.
This will annoy you so much, that you turn your symbolic links to
something else. :)
|don't know that anyone else in the world uses mail as an MUA, so,
I do. In fact quite a lot of people of the elder generation use
it, Mr. Doug McIlroy comes to mind at very first. Of course
S-nail does not have the spam support that Heirloom had, i have
thrown it away very early, we rely on external software (i use
bogofilter with unreleased LMDB support, for example), and the
Heirloom spam filter does not use lists of words, but only (a
subset of) their hashes, so that years of Bayesian filter training
will be lost when switching to S-nail. The other way around is
possible.
|perhaps, you don't need to concern yourself with others, but if they
|do, they may expect it to open symbolic links and not-read the man
|page.
What do you think of prompting when interactive? I think i will
add that for the next release.
| HSN: 'You can use the command escape "~Q MESSAGE LIST" in
|compose mode to quote messages'
| I write with emacs. I save a message to which I wish to reply
|in my outgoing mail folder, edit it there. I use correct English
|quoting.
Ooooh! How complicated! May i ask you why you are doing that?
If you use this as a MUA, you can simply `reply' to a message, and
enter compose-mode from within which you can start your editor of
choice. If you "set editalong=v" then your $VISUAL (=e for
$EDITOR) will be spawned automatically. I seem to recall that
emacs has some emacsclient or so program which will attach to
a global emacs session, no? I have never tried that, but
wouldn't this work: drive S-nail in an emacs shell window, use
that emacsclient or so as the $VISUAL, "set editalong=v"?
But at that time thanks for not using an emacs builtin mail client!
Of course you are the master of your quotation style, Mr.!
| HSN: 'Oh, Herr! Normally "Junger Herr" ("Young Mr."). But
|thanks :)'
| The last time someone referred to me as young, it was the
|librarian at the Goethe Institute in Mexico City, talking in German to
|one of her assistants (ein junge Mann...) I was looking for a
^r
|then-rare book, published only in German, long out of print, that was
|in the card catalog but not on the shelf. (It had disappeared, alas!,
|but was published again years later, hooray!, including an English
|translation.) She was cute, probably not older than I was. I didn't
|get a date.
Mr. Bell.
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
