Re: ambiguities in RFC 2821 regarding end of mail data

On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 16:50:17 EDT, "Richard O. Hammer" 
<ROHammer(_at_)earthlink(_dot_)net>  said:

> The first ambiguity concerns this question:  When I receive this 
> sequence CRLF.CRLF, should the data which I capture include the first 
> CRLF or not?
No.

> But the RFC leaves room for confusion.  This phrase from section 3.3
> might be interpreted both ways, "...the SMTP server ... considers all
> succeeding lines up to but not including the end of mail data
> indicator to be the message text."  What is "the end of mail data
> indicator"?  Section 4.1.1.4 calls the whole CRLF.CRLF the "end of
> mail data indication".
Right.  Nothing confusing there.

> The second ambiguity relates to the first, and it concerns the 
> question: When I receive a period alone in the first line of mail data 
> should I consider that the end of the data?
Well... unless you're using SMTP to pass non 822/2822 mail, you're going
to be dropping it on the floor ANYHOW because if that's the end of the
data, there's not much to deliver (you need *at least* a CRLF pair to
mark the end-of-822 headers and start-of-body).

> I believe that I should consider the sequence .CRLF to be the end of 
> the data if those are the first three bytes received by the data 
> parsing routine.
Unless you're doing non-822 mail, what you've received at that point is a
broken set of RFC822 headers consisting of the single octet '.'

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