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Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?
From: |
Andy Bradford |
Subject: |
Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs? |
Date: |
21 Feb 2023 18:33:31 -0700 |
Thus said Ken Hornstein on Tue, 21 Feb 2023 07:17:19 -0500:
> I'm sitting down to write or modify nmh code. Right now we have a lot
> of code that assumes NUL-terminated C strings are safe to represent
> email everywhere. My question is: is that a valid assumption?
I don't think nmh should produce anything that contains NUL bytes, but
whether or not it should accept such is a different question (as you
mention the 16 million byte line of text in an email message that I keep
getting from a certain sender that cannot be bothered to follow the RFC
which clearly states that base64 MIME data should be 78 characters and
clearly not longer than 998).
When I was poking around in the POP code I didn't notice any special
handling of NUL bytes. It's possible that this would result in
truncation. If that's what we do now, I suspect it's alright to continue
to do so; at least until we find legitimate emails in the wild that do
not conform (again think 16M character lines).
nmh's POP code has been silently truncating long lines (e.g. those
greater than 1023 bytes) for years and crashing on lines that were
longer than 32,767 bytes). I only recently discovered this while trying
to figure out what to do with a 16M character line. I went back through
old emails and sure enough, I had a lot of truncation. I never noticed
because most of them were in long lines of HTML that I don't ever bother
reading.
So I guess what I'm saying is, I think it's alright to continue to treat
messages as C-strings (until it isn't).
Andy
- Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, (continued)
Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Ken Hornstein, 2023/02/20
- Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, George Michaelson, 2023/02/20
- Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Ken Hornstein, 2023/02/21
- Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Paul Fox, 2023/02/21
- Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Michael Richardson, 2023/02/21
- Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Ken Hornstein, 2023/02/21
Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?,
Andy Bradford <=
Message not availableRe: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Ken Hornstein, 2023/02/21
Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Andy Bradford, 2023/02/22
Message not availableRe: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Ken Hornstein, 2023/02/22
Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Andy Bradford, 2023/02/22
Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Michael Richardson, 2023/02/23
Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, Andy Bradford, 2023/02/21
Re: (Not-so) hypothetical question: What to do about NULs?, David Levine, 2023/02/21