Re: Content-Length harmful
Quoting Avery Pennarun (apenwarr@worldvisions.ca):
> > (I.e., dhesi isn't transparent enough a solution for something that's
> > already deployed.)
>
> I guess you missed my point.
No, I just disagreed with it. :)
> I was saying that mbox, as it is, corrupts messages. I can send you a
> message that says:
>
> >From what camel dost the cavern fall?
> From the pink camel, of course. Yeesh.
>
> And it will appear in your mbox as follows:
>
> >From what camel dost the cavern fall?
> >From the pink camel, of course. Yeesh.
Actually, in my mboxes, that wouldn't happen. Procmail's set so that it
adds the content-length and doesn't quote From's.
> mbox corrupts messages, period. Here's what you would see if you used a
> dhasi MDA and an mbox MUA:
>
> >>From what camel dost the cavern fall?
> >From the pink camel, of course. Yeesh.
>
> Not much better, but no worse. Similarly, if you use an mbox MDA and a
> dhasi MUA:
>
> From what camel dost the cavern fall?
> From the pink camel, of course. Yeesh.
>
> This looks bad, but pure-mbox is just as bad. Look up above again.
Yes pure-mbox is pretty nasty. But the content-length solution is a
little bit better. Why? Because it hasn't touched the body of my
message.
> A partial dhasi system is no better than mbox, but no worse. A completely
> dhasi system is much better, and if we want a completely dhasi system, we
> can't be afraid to leave mbox.
But people are already using mbox, which is indistinguishable from your
new system. How can a poor MUA know when to strip a >From and when to
leave it alone? And we can't just ignore the existing MUAs. Whereas an
MUA recognizing content-length can use it if present, and never needs to
worry about whether to strip a >. So you can do a _partial_ deployment.
Machines using strict mbox symantics will still screw up their email,
but newer machines won't munge anything. As I said, it's still pretty
bad, but I prefer the principle of least destruction. The real solution
is to just drop mbox; then you don't need to worry about
interoperability, you get a whole host of other advantages, and it's no
harder than changing the mbox format.
Mike Stone
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