[Email-SIG] fixing the current email module

[Barry Warsaw]

On Oct 7, 2009, at 6:33 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Haven't looked in your spam bucket recently, I guess.  Spammers
> regularly put 8 bit characters into headers (and into bodies in
> messages without a Content-Type header), for one thing.

Interesting story: Launchpad (which is open source now so there are no  
secrets) uses XMLRPC when Mailman holds a message for moderation,  
storing it in Launchpad's database for display to the list (team)  
owner.  Well, I was lazy, stupid, or both and didn't wrap the objects  
in a Binary over the wire, so we were getting tons of failures here.   
But none of them seemed to have any practical effect on user  
experience (read: we got zero bug reports for missing held messages).

I finally found the time to debug the problem, because the failures in  
themselves were cryptic and common enough to cause our operations  
people headaches.  So I cowboyed in some additional capture code and  
ran it for 24 hours.  Guess what I found?

We were essentially crapping out on /tons/ of messages with 8-bit in  
headers, and these messages were basically getting dropped on the  
floor.  Why no bug reports?  Because /every/ single captured message  
was spam.  How's that for a bug having unintended positive consequences?

-Barry

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