Re: SMTP question (not quite Gnus-related)

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

On 08 Feb 2001, Steven E. Harris wrote:
> 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.

Yes, yes.  This misunderstanding is the reason why they included the
first <CRLF>.  If you write "foo<CRLF>", do you have a line which
contains the 3 characters "foo" plus an EOL?  Well, this depends on
what comes before that.  If there is an "x" before this, the line
contains 4 characters plus EOL.

But I hope you understood what I meant: "<CRLF>.<CRLF>" is an empty
line plus a 1-char line only if it is the start of the whole thing, or
follows a line.

>> 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."

Well, RFC 822 says that the body is a sequence of lines, so the body
always ends with a line, and a line ends with an EOL.  So the body
ends with an EOL.

If you want to transmit something which is not a sequence of lines,
you have to add something on top of SMTP.  Maybe MIME is your friend?

kai
-- 
Be indiscrete.  Do it continuously.