Re: [Nmh-workers] masquerade settings & spost

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On 2012-02-07, at 7:37 AM, Oliver Kiddle wrote:

> But do you really think that
> should be the only resort when badly formed mail arrives? I'd prefer to
> see what was intended by the sender.

Yes, I do :-(  QP and Base64 (and MIME in general) have been around for nearly 
two decades now.  If the sender can't get it right, too bad.  And really, the 
only time I see that sort of cruft is from spamming software.

But ultimately, you cannot guess what the sender intended.  Did they intend to 
send 8859? If so, why that exception character in the midst of what is 
otherwise valid QP?  Does the encoder have a bug?  It would seem unlikely in 
this day and age.  The alternatives are someone hand-editing the encoded 
message content – in which case I won't even try to guess what they meant - or 
the more likely scenario of someone trying to attack your M[STU]A by botching 
the MIME parser.  And never rule out sunspots; cosmic ray memory bit flips *do* 
happen.

Postel's maxim about being liberal about what you except meant "don't crash the 
IMP when someone sends buggy packets."  It never meant "read the senders mind."

--lyndon