At 5:28 AM +1100 2/10/02, Andrew Thompson imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding: >Well, whoever is right, it certainly appears as if BPC is >implementing a rule. And it's sure easier for me to comply, rather >than fight Big Pond.
Sad but probably true. Some of us actually have Big Pond (and all the rest of Telstra's operations) blocked at the router level because of their repeated multifaceted displays of dangerous incompetence, but I guess that would be impractical for someone in .au... >The mystery is how come _only_ HTML messages (not text) Your HTML mail and text mail are (probably) coming from different programs that have different understandings of mail. The HTML is probably generated by some program that is not breaking lines regularly or is using a linebreak that the bad MTA at Big Pond doesn't recognize as a linebreak. For example, both Classic MacOS and Windows use a bare CR for line breaking, and many programs on both platforms only actually insert explicit breaks at paragraph ends to make 'soft wrapping' of lines to fit variable windows simpler. An MTA trying to enforce a body line length is very likely to be looking for at least a LF at the end of a line, and probably a CRLF pair, so even if that HTML mail has lots of lines with hard Mac or Windows breaks, it could be seen by the cranky server as one long line. In addition, the concept of 'HTML mail' pretty much relies on extensions to the classical mail standards (notably MIME) that rely on violating some of the older strictures on mail format, so it is very likely that anything generating HTML mail will ignore some of the classical rules. The text mail is probably originating with or passing through some program (like a mail client) which thinks of all mail as plain text and knows that plain text mail should contain mail-safe characters in fairly short lines terminated by CRLF pairs. >from SIMS SIMS will NEVER modify message data. This sounds like a good thing and in principle it is. In practice it USUALLY is. Unfortunately it sometimes means that SIMS will not handle a problem that other mail servers might avoid. Some mail servers will automatically re-encode for transit any message that arrives with a MIME Content-Type or encoding that isn't classically 'mail safe' (i.e. using 7-bit characters and broken into nice short lines by CRLF pairs) before passing the message along. This is a perilous strategy for a mail server, since it can result in creating a message that the recipient cannot decode. In the end, the problem is a trinity: 1. The mail itself violates a classical rule on mail format. 2. The Big Pond mail server is enforcing a classical rule on mail format that is generally considered outdated and is inconsistent with some modern popular mail formats. 3. SIMS is accepting the "broken" mail and not "fixing" it before sending it along. This is widely seen as correct MTA behavior because of the messes that "fixing" mail formatting can cause, however there are many other MTA's which will attempt such a fix and in most cases that fix is never noticed by anyone except in the fact that "it just works." I don't think the right fix for this situation is for Stalker to change SIMS, since a transparent server is better than one which can convert mail from something a recipient can read to something they can't read. You've made it pretty clear (and I believe you, having dealt with various slimy pieces of Telstra) that getting Big Pond to use a mail server that fits the 1990's is not a feasible project. The only other option I see is to tell users that if they get this sort of bounce they should find whatever settings exist in the programs they use to compose mail to make sure that everything they send is linewrapped properly and/or MIME/base64 encoded. -- Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED] ############################################################# This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the INDEX mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
