Thus spake Robert Elz:
Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:39:37 -0800
From: Jon Steinhart <jon(_at_)fourwinds(_dot_)com>
Message-ID:
<201012020539(_dot_)oB25db6v024518(_at_)darkstar(_dot_)fourwinds(_dot_)com>
| A big thing that someone could do to help me with this would be to
| collect all of the various grammar into a single document.
Aside from intellectual curiosity, no, I don't think that's either
needed or useful. We know we can never have everything, as there's
sure to be something new appearing tomorrow - the right solution is
to deal with the general principles properly, not to attempt to be
able to handle every detail (even less so, as half the world's mail
systems generate improperly formed messages, if we think we know what is
correct, half - or more - the mail we ever see will fail).
We need to understand the general principles of header fields, and MIME
separators, etc, and then understand exactly those elements that are
required for the job that is needed - and simply ignore everything else
(leave that for someone who needs it, and can understand and add that
code, or simply ignore it totally if it adds no value for us).
It's probably not necessary to fully implement RFC822 parsing (e.g.,
does anybody use bang paths these days?) but trying to proceed on
"general principles" when you have a well-defined spec in hand is folly.
--
J.
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