Re: [Mailman-Developers] NULL characters in e-mail.
At 4:43 PM -0700 9/20/00, Dan Mick wrote:
Just out of curiosity, why is this not the MTA's job? (actually I'm really surprised it made it through the MTA unscathed)
I suppose maybe the RFC says something about it...hmm...
the MTA probably has to be transparent here. I can't think of anything in the RFCs that'd cover it, so I wouldn't depend on it. More importantly, since the MTAs clearly don't do anything about this, the MLM can't simply say "not my problem" and wait for all of the MTAs to get "fixed".
But I could make the same argument about MLMs (of which there are more than one) or MUAs (same). The question of "whose responsibility is it" is a useful one.
For instance, if indeed it was the MTA's violation, maybe it's only this one MTA, or one revision of the MTA, that had the bug. So fixing MLMs would be the wrong thing to do.
Maybe you know something more about the set of MTAs involved than I do, since you say "the MTAs cleaerly don't do anything".
But I could make the same argument about MLMs (of which there are more than one) or MUAs (same). The question of "whose responsibility is it" is a useful one.
For instance, if indeed it was the MTA's violation, maybe it's only this one MTA, or one revision of the MTA, that had the bug. So fixing MLMs would be the wrong thing to do.
Maybe you know something more about the set of MTAs involved than I do, since you say "the MTAs cleaerly don't do anything".
Speaking for the Postfix MTA, it attempts to be as transparent as possible. NULL's will be passed through in the body (although headers are a different matter). I would suggest this is not going to change.
If we were just talking about individual postings, I would say "fair enough - if the sender includes crap, let it through", but digests are a different matter, as the bogosity will effect other people's postings (for similar reasons, list admins often want to remove attachments when building a digest).
Andrew McNamara (System Architect)
connect.com.au Pty Ltd Lvl 3, 213 Miller St, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia Phone: +61 2 9409 2117, Fax: +61 2 9409 2111
On Wed, Sep 20, 2000 at 05:01:59PM -0700, Dan Mick wrote:
[about NUL's in message bodies]
For instance, if indeed it was the MTA's violation, maybe it's only this one MTA, or one revision of the MTA, that had the bug. So fixing MLMs would be the wrong thing to do.
We have a fair bit of problems with NUL characters in message bodies. Not because our mailer rejects it, but quite the opposite: a large section of the half-arsed SMTP servers for Windows can't handle it. Customers of ours have a SMTP queue waiting for them when they dial in, one Sendmail is started to deliver the queue, and the remote server crashes or freezes or otherwise misbehaves while sending the mail with a NUL in it. And the queue is not re-ordered, so any new mail is kept waiting, too. We end up doing a lot of manual repair in those cases, either removing the messages or editing them (usually the first, unless the customer wants to save the mail.)
Curiously enough, those NULs often come from similar half-arsed Windows MTAs or perhaps MUAs ;P I don't think we can make assumptions about those NULs, but it would probably be a good idea to mask them. I doubt Mailman itself has any problems with the NULs, since Mailman is written in Python, and Python handles NULs in strings just fine. The same goes for the archives. The archives may look truncated when using some browser or MUA, but all the data is in there just fine.
-- Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>
Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!
participants (3)
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Andrew McNamara -
Dan Mick -
Thomas Wouters