Re: Is anyone else getting mail after it goes through a PMDF machine? (was: Odd mail package involved?)
Raul Miller <moth@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 11:03:02AM -0500, Daniel Martin wrote:
> > Would it be legitimate for an MTA to strip control characters in
> > headers? If so, do any MTA's actually do that? If so, why doesn't
> > the qmail on lists.debian.org?
>
> The only changes qmail makes to the message are \r\n -> \n (which is
> required) and prefixing the message with headers. The philosophy behind
> qmail is that mail transport should not be a lossy operation.
Well, yes, in the body section of the message I agree with that.
However, I would think that the idea "be liberal in what you accept,
conservative in what you output" would still apply to the mail
headers, which ought to be straight ascii (or maybe iso885-1); in that
case, outgoing mail headers hould not contain any characters in the
range 0-31 except for a single CR/LF to mark each line's end.
On the other hand, I also see that there's no really compelling
argument for stripping the extra CR vs. not stripping it - it
shouldn't be there to begin with. I also know that having software
correct invalid input is a slippery slope that leads to some most
undesireable destinations.
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