At 20:43 16/05/2006, Tulsi Ram Mayala wrote:
The question is not about the difficulty/ease of implementation. It is
about defining exact inverse operation and RFC should define it correctly.
Yes a sender sending a single dot is buggy.
But a receiver not removing a dot in case of a single dot should not be
called buggy.
Why? It simply doesn't do what RFC 2821 says it should do - ie, it's not
SMTP compliant if it doesn't remove a leading dot.
Maybe a better way to put it is it can throw an error ("Invalid data
input" or something else).
It probably could if it wanted to, but silently not removing the dot is a
bug AFAICS.
I can't see any reason to consider a change to RFC 2821 here. It's pretty
clear, not self-contradictory, and not a problem to implement.