[Mimedefang] Bare returns in message body

Mark admin at asarian-host.net
Thu Nov 17 09:16:08 EST 2005


> -----Original Message-----
> From: mimedefang-bounces at lists.roaringpenguin.com 
> [mailto:mimedefang-bounces at lists.roaringpenguin.com] On 
> Behalf Of Jan Pieter Cornet
> Sent: woensdag 16 november 2005 10:56
> To: mimedefang at lists.roaringpenguin.com
> Subject: Re: [Mimedefang] Bare returns in message body


> Patching sendmail to reject on bare LF terminated lines is likely
> asking for a LOT of trouble. Since traditionally sendmail doesn't care
> if you used CRLF or just LF, it's likely that lots of (local, unix-
> specific) programs submit messages using only LF line endings. Some
> programs might even implicitly rely on the fact that sendmail
> "corrects" the line endings.

Indeed. I can tell you that, text-processing wise, almost everything I do
on my server, in Perl scripts, starts with something that performs a
"tr//" like function to convert CRLF to single LF. And in Perl you really
kinda want to, as well; otherwise regex-es that count on $ and such (where
you do *not* expect to have the end of your line to be a CR; or things
like /bla\n/, etc.) will surely break.

I have always found it a particular strength that MIME::Tools is not fussy
about either CRLF, or just LF. And I thank sendmail for the same reason.
If this were not the case, you'd have to keep the exact CRLF/LF sequences
of each text, which really can yield quite unexpected, undesired results.
And I'm happy both do their own converting to whatever format they see
fit.

Hence, lets not break things, and keep them the way they are (even if it
does mean that there are scripts out there that do things with CR/LF that,
strictly speaking, are not RFC compliant).

- Mark 
 
        System Administrator Asarian-host.org
 
---
"If you were supposed to understand it,
we wouldn't call it code." - FedEx




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