Re: bad (i.e. serious) mail problems

[Dmitry Yaitskov <dimas@home.com>]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> wrote:

> * Dmitry Yaitskov <dimas@home.com>  on Tue, 30 Mar 1999
> | I think it was. It was pop3-movemail that built an invalid mbox from
> | perfectly valid *separate* messages retrieved via pop3 one by one.
> 
> I obviously disagree.  It did the best it could with data that was invalid
> to begin with.  Garbage in, garbage out.

Ok. All this argument has taken too much of my (and probably others')
time already. This thread has become riduculously long, so I'm posting
one last time on this topic. No more posts won't mean I agreed with
you, because I do not. Hopefully the xemacs maintainers will
incorporate my patch, otherwise I'll just apply it as new versions
come out. Still, one last time I'll argue with you.

First, your "Garbage in, garbage out" motto is, pardon my Frehcn,
complete bullshit as applied to email. Users shouldn't suffer because
a program reading their mail has its own notion of what is right and
what is wrong, and doesn't care if other programs have different such
notions. It would be at least understandable if it refused the problem
message *and* indicated to the uset that there was a "bad" message,
but it just plain silently screws things up. This is bad.

Also, 3 different pop3 servers that I get mail from provide mail in a
format that *you* consider to be broken in one respect or another.
Even if they were, no reasonable email program should ignore what 3
random unrelated pop3 servers out of 3 do.

Last, you still have not provided a single quote from a single rfc
which says that a message retrieved via pop3 *must* have one of the
magic sequences you're looking for as its first line, and *must* have
"\n\nFrom " lines quoted.

Thank you.

-- 
Cheers,
-Dima.