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Re: OT: Re: Less is more

2004-12-06 08:34:19

On Thu April 29 2004 11:38, Frode Gill wrote:

On Thu, 29 Apr 2004 17:33:03 +0200, Frode Gill 
<frodegill(_at_)opera(_dot_)com> wrote:

I beg to differ. As a little test, it would be interesting to see how many 
of the mail-clients we use are able to parse the Date:-header in this 
message, which as far as I can tell is perfectly legal according to RFC2822.

Somewhere along the way, the header was replaced with something more clean, 
which is a good indication of that not everyone manages to parse legal 
RFC2822-headers.
Here is the header I tried to send, with [SPACE] to explicitly mark a 
whitespace, [CRLF] to mark linefeeds and [EOL] to mark end of header:

Date: (Mon, (29)30 Feb 2004 \30:00\) THU (Wed, 28 Feb 2004 13:00) Friday 
\(Sat) 29 (=?iso-8859-15?Q?Feb?= ("or Mar")"?) Apr[CRLF]
[SPACE]2004 17:[CRLF]
[SPACE](62)10:(:(:)\):)30 (Oslo, Norway) +2560[EOL]

[OK, so I'm a little behind in reading mail-ng, particularly
messages marked as off-topic...]

There are many violations of RFC 2822 and other relevant
standards in that field:

1.  Any line containing an encoded-word (in a comment or
    any other legal place) must not be longer than 76 octets
    [RFC 2047, sec. 2]

2. In addition, RFC 2822 recommends a line length limit of
    78 octets.

3. RFC 2822 section 3.3 specifies that FWS only (i.e. no
    comments) may appear between the day and the
    month name.

4. The same section prohibits CFWS within the time-of-day

5. Only FWS (no comments) is permitted between the
    time and the zone offset

6. The zone offset minutes must be in the range 00 to
    59.

So the field isn't even close to being legal.  Whatever
generated it was not compliant with either RFC 2047
or RFC 2822.

Also, regardless of what RFC 2822 permits in terms of
syntax, common sense dictates that a zone offset must
correspond to an actual zone (otherwise the field would
be semantic gibberish), and there are no zones outside
the range -1200 through +1400 (and none since the
Date field was invented (RFC 561) with an offset's
minutes portion other than 00, 30, or 45, or an offset
which is not a multiple of 15 minutes).

Changes made to clearly illegal fields indicate nothing
about ability to parse legal fields.


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