Re: mx.gnus.org being very strict

[Matthias Andree <ma@dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de>]

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

> Yes.  Gateways should just pass bytes along, not try to be smart about
> it. 

Per, MIME is well defined. The gate sees "no Content-Transfer-Encoding,
but 8 bit data -> RFC-2822 violated, admin wants this refused".

It sees a malformatted mail and rejects it.
It sees a well-formatted mail and passes it on.
The default in Postfix is to pass on even junk
 - the admin decided otherwise.

> We haven't had nearly enough of that.  All the fucking mess we went
> through until we reached the current fragile and complex state of
> sometimes-working i18n in mail, is due to the utter incompetence of
> the mail standard guys, who thought that instead of simplifying
> thousands of mail servers running a dozen different code bases to be
> transparent, we should put highly complex workarounds in millions
> clients from hundreds of different code bases.

If you don't like workarounds,
send MIME with quoted-printable or base64 encoding, then no-one will
touch your mail in transport except to add Received: headers.

> This being the polite interpretation.  Ask Dan Bernstein for the
> unsweetened version.

DJB is not a reference, NIMBY (not in my back yard) principle WRT
security and fixes and apologies to the own users, deliberate standard
violation, this doesn't at all help his reputation.

The gateway demands that 8-bit stuff be advertised at 8-bit stuff in the
header. And it has every right to do that, and I cannot find anything
wrong with that. Impractical maybe...

-- 
Matthias Andree

Encrypted mail welcome: my GnuPG key ID is 0x052E7D95