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

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

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

> On the one hand, it is a defacto standard.  On the other, because it is
> not an official standard, SMTP software should escape anything that
> might break SMTP software, such as lines in the body of a message that
> look like they might be envelopes.

I take great exception to the contention that my MTA should arbitrarily
munge messages just because some SMTP software uses a poorly designed and
badly implemented message delimiter structure.  The only reason why my
mail messages ever touch mbox format currently is because I'm still using
an old version of Gnus that can't read maildir native.

Both SMTP and POP have well-defined, unambiguous, and *reversible*
protocols for indicating to the remote system where the end of the message
is.  Adding on top of that an ambiguous protocol requiring an irreversible
escaping to not break, that is then parsed using a lot of really touchy
parsing that's not consistent across different MUAs, is broken.
Fundamentally and totally broken.  The fact that it's been broken in that
way for many years and that a lot of different software implements that
breakage is not an excuse.

Lots of mail software can now deliver to maildirs (including, IIRC, Exim
and Postfix).  Cyrus IMAP servers use another mail spool format that
similarly avoids escaping issues.  The number of servers that can handle
mail without doing broken >From escaping is growing and will continue to
grow.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>