Re: SMTP question (not quite Gnus-related)

["Steven E. Harris" <steven.harris@tenzing.com>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

[...]

> By this reading, "<CRLF>.<CRLF>" is *two* lines: an empty line and a
> line containing only a dot.

Well, I think that there can be line content before the first <CRLF>
and still have the <CRLF>.<CRLF> be a valid terminator.

> In "DATA<CRLF>foo<CRLF>.<CRLF>", does the message contain "foo" or
> "foo<CRLF>"?  Or even "<CRLF>foo<CRLF>"?

This is the same question I asked in my previous post a few minutes
ago. I think that the message just contains "foo," because there must
be some way for you to send "foo" and get "foo" back out on the other
side. If you send "foo" and you get back "foo<CRLF>," that would seem
like an intolerable asymmetry in a "transparency" mechanism.

That would then raise another question: If you meant to send
"foo<CRLF>," then would the SMTP encoding be "foo<CRLF><CRLF>.<CRLF>"
or just "foo<CRLF>.<CRLF>"? Who owns that first <CRLF>?!?

I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to nitpick. I must have defined
behavior for this stream, and it's supposed to work "transparently."

-- 
Steven E. Harris        :: steven.harris@tenzing.com
Tenzing                 :: http://www.tenzing.com