Lyndon Nerenberg writes:
So, the _right_ thing to do here is not clear, at least to me. The MIME
RFCs don't spell out what to do when you receive a message that is
malformed; are you supposed to error out?
Yes.
In which case, how are you supposed to read the message? I know it's
nominally "corrupt". You know it too. But the sender doesn't give a
shit, and asking them to resend it without the brokenness just results
in "but everyone else can read it, it must be your fault". Yes, I've
been there, done that. And that's not just from non-technical people.
I've shown the relevant RFCs to IT professionals and pointed out
exactly where their messages weren't keeping to the spec and they
still just shrug and say it works for everyone else.
So our options are to either take the moral high ground and say "it's
not our problem", or to take a more pragmatic approach and do our best
to show the contents of the message to the user, even though we know
the message isn't compliant. I'd favour the latter approach. Printing
a warning and assuming 8bit would seem to have few downsides to me.
Tet
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