[Email-SIG] fixing the current email module
R. David Murray
rdmurray at bitdance.com
Sat Oct 10 01:20:54 CEST 2009
On Fri, 9 Oct 2009 at 13:26, Glenn Linderman wrote:
> On approximately 10/9/2009 8:10 AM, came the following characters from the
> keyboard of Stephen J. Turnbull:
>> Glenn Linderman writes:
>> > > > produce a defect report, but then simply converted to Unicode as if
>> > > > it were Latin-1 (since there is no other knowledge available that
>> > > > could produce a better conversion).
>> > >
>> > > No, that is already corruption. Most clients will assume that string
>> > > is valid as a header, because it's valid as a string.
>> >
>> > Sure it is corruption. That's why there is a defect report. But
>> > the conversion technique is appropriate, per the Postel principle.
>>
>> Actually, I would say you are emitting leniently, in violation of the
>> Postel principle.
>
> You can say that, but I don't have to believe it. I'm talking about
> accepting; the message has arrived, it is here, the client is trying to look
> at it, and I'm talking about ways the client can look at not-quite-perfect
> data, knowing that it is not quite perfect, but still being able to see it.
> I'm not at all talking about emitting data. You seem to be calling the email
> package helping the client to accept not-quite-perfect data, as a form of
> emitting data. It is not.
IMO, the appropriate way for the email package to provide the API you
are talking about is it provide the client with a way to get at the raw
byte string, which I think everyone agrees on. If the client wants to
decode it as if it were latin-1 to process it, it can then do that.
--David (RDM)
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