82 Mail
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 92 16:07:47 HKT
From: “Olin G. Shivers” <[email protected]>
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: Need your help.Anybody who thinks that uuencode protects a mail message is living
in a pipe dream. Uuencode doesn’t help. The idiot program uses
ASCII spaces in its encoding. Strings of nuls map to strings of
blanks. Many Unix mailers thoughtfully strip trailing blanks from
lines of mail. This nukes your carefully–encoded data. Well, it’s
Unix, what did you expect?Of course you can grovel over the data, find the lines that aren’t the
right length, and re-pad with blanks—that will (almost certainly?) fix
it up. What else is your time for anyway, besides cleaning up after
the interactions of multiple brain-damaged Unix so-called “utilities?”Just try and find a goddamn spec for uuencoded data sometime. In
the man page? Hah. No way. Go read the source—that’s the “spec.”I particularly admire the way uuencode insists on creating a file for
you, instead of working as a stdio filter. Instead of piping into tar,
which knows about creating files, and file permissions, and directo-
ries, and so forth, we build a half-baked equivalent functionality
directly into uuencode so it’ll be there whether you want it or not.
And I really, really like the way uuencode by default makes files that
are world writable.Maybe it’s Unix fighting back, but this precise bug hit one of the editors of
this book after editing in this message in April 1993. Someone mailed him
a uuencoded PostScript version of a conference paper, and fully 12 lines
had to be handpatched to put back trailing blanks before uudecode repro-
duced the original file.Error Messages
The Unix mail system knows that it isn’t perfect, and it is willing to tell you
so. But it doesn’t always do so in an intuitive way. Here’s a short listing of
the error messages that people often witness:
550 chiarell... User unknown: Not a typewriter550 <[email protected]>...
User unknown: Address already in use