ugh.book

From: <[email protected]> 81

I don’t and others don’t think this is a bug. If you can come up

with an RFC that states that we should not be doing this I’m

sure we will fix it. Until then this is my last reply. I have

brought this to the attention of my supervisors as I stated

before. As I said before, it appears it is Unix’s way of handling

it. I have sent test messages from machines running the latest

software. As my final note, here is a section from rfc976:

[deleted]

I won’t include that wonderful quote, which nowhere justifies a mail

forwarding agent modifying the body of a message—it simply says

that “From” lines and “>From” lines, wherever they might have

come from, are members of the syntactic class From_Lines. Using

typical Unix reasoning, since it doesn’t specifically say you can’t do

it, and it mentions that such lines exist, it must be legal, right?

I recently dug up a July 1982 RFC draft for SMTP. It makes it clear

that messages are to be delivered unchanged, with certain docu-

mented exceptions. Nothing about >’s. Here we are 10 years later,

and not only is it still wrong—at a commercial system that charges

for its services—but those who are getting it wrong can’t even SEE

that it’s wrong.

I think I need to scream.

uuencode: Another Patch, Another Failure

You can tell those who live on the middle rings of Unix Hell from those on
lower levels. Those in the middle levels know about >From lossage but
think that uuencode is the way to avoid problems. Uuencode encodes a file
that uses only 7-bit characters, instead of 8-bit characters that Unix mailers
or network systems might have difficulty sending. The program uudecode
decodes a uuencoded file to produce a copy of the original file. A uuen-
coded file is supposedly safer to send than plain text; for example,
“>From” distortion can’t occur to such a file. Unfortunately, Unix mailers
have other ways of screwing users to the wall:

(^5) This message was returned to a UNIX-HATER subscriber by a technical support
representative at a major Internet provider. We’ve omitted that company’s name,
not in the interest of protecting the guilty, but because there was no reason to single
out this particular company: the notion that “sendmail is always right” is endemic
among all of the Internet service providers.