9 Dec
2003
9 Dec
'03
6:15 p.m.
On Dec 10, 0:58, Tony Duell wrote:
So what do you want me to change? Should it be
text/plain? Or should
I
remove that header line altogether (I am not going to
totally upgrade
my
mail software!). Or should I just stop posting here?
It wasn't a rant, Tony, just an observation :-) If you want to do
something about it, and it's easy to do, I'd remove that header
altogether. It's not valid unless you put the rest of the MIME headers
in as well.
Of course, one could also argue that whatever is misinterpreting the
email in question is also broken, and should be fixed.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
9 Dec
9 Dec
9:08 p.m.
On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 08:15, Pete Turnbull wrote:
Of course, one could also argue that whatever is
misinterpreting the
email in question is also broken, and should be fixed.
Well I'd say yes. It would appear that the software in question isn't
doing any kind of analysis on the actual content of the messages at all
(otherwise some - probably most / all - would get through and a few
might be flagged as potential threats due to certain binary patterns in
the text)
That seems a little over-cautious of the software to me, given that the
messages are presumably arriving as plain text and not as an attachment.
Unless of course the affected people are using email software that
blindly tries to run anything that looks like it has some kind of macro
embedded in it :) If a sensible email client is being used one would
hope that it is an option in the virus software than can be turned off.
Whether questionable headers mean that the emails should be flagged as
potential spam is another matter... :-)
The world seems to have become a complex place... I miss the days of
command-line mail clients, and if you really wanted to send an
attachment it was a case of encoding it yourself and relying on the
recipient knowing how to decode it...
cheers
Jules
10 Dec
10 Dec
10:15 a.m.
The world seems to have become a complex place... I
miss the days of
command-line mail clients, and if you really wanted to send an
attachment it was a case of encoding it yourself and relying on the
recipient knowing how to decode it...
You do realise that's exactly what I do here, still. If I want to send
somebody a binary, I normally uuencode it, and pipe the result to
mail(1). MIME enocoding is a lot harder for me, so I try to avoid having
to do it....
And any mail program that attempts to run anything (binary or macro)
automatically is broken. Period. It's as secure as leaving your door keys
in the door with a big sign explaining how to use them!
-tony
5:37 p.m.
Whether questionable headers mean that the emails
should be flagged
as potential spam is another matter... :-)
Well, for a long time I've been rejecting mail with Content-Type:
_and_ Content-Transfer-Encoding: but no MIME-Version:. It trips on
non-spam once every blue moon or thereabouts (well, actually, probably
more often than blue moons: maybe every six months or so) but trips
relatively often on spam.
The world seems to have become a complex place... I
miss the days of
command-line mail clients, and if you really wanted to send an
attachment it was a case of encoding it yourself and relying on the
recipient knowing how to decode it...
Well...the software is stil around. Even the recipients who knew what
to do when they see a "begin 644 fnord.tar.gz" line are still around.
The trouble is, they're drowned out by the hordes who wouldn't
recognize btoa output if it bit them. :-( Nowadays you have to do
protocol first to ensure that you can agree on compression and encoding
methods. (And if I want to create a message with "attachments", I go
up and edit the Content-Type: header by hand, run the binary blobs
through "base64 -e", edit in the separator lines...and occasionally get
it wrong, but oh well.)
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
10:04 a.m.
On Dec 10, 0:58, Tony Duell wrote:
Sure.... It's a pity the tone of my voice doesn't come across in postings
-- I wasn't moaning...
So what do you want me to change? Should it be
text/plain? Or should
I
remove that header line altogether (I am not
going to totally upgrade
my
mail software!). Or should I just stop posting
here?
It wasn't a rant, Tony, just an observation :-) If you want to do something about it, and it's easy to do, I'd
remove that header
altogether. It's not valid unless you put the rest of the MIME headers
in as well.
Well, based on what was said last night, I've changed it to text/plain.
Let's see if that helps, or if it causes more problems, or what. It's not
hard to change it -- it's a fprintf() in one of the elm source files, I
just have to edit that file, run make, and then copy the binary over.
I'm not a programmer, but I can figure out how to do that.
-tony
7635
days inactive
7636
days old
4 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk -
mouse＠Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA -
pete＠dunnington.u-net.com