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Re: [Nmh-workers] Request Deprecation of mts.conf's mmdelim1 and mmdelim2.

2017-05-25 03:26:32
Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> writes:

No, it always was in band - the 4-SOH sequence was searched for in all
lines of the message, and SOH has always been a possible character in
e-mail.   Just even more unlikely years ago than it is now.

You know, I _was_ going to disagree here but Robert is, as he almost
always is, 100% correct.  4-SOH is not valid in an email HEADER
(mostly), but it is certainly valid in a message BODY, and this goes all
the way back to RFC 822.  There were some minor changes along the way
(RFC 822 said NULs were valid, but RFC 2822 said they were not), but SOH
has always been a valid character in email bodies; MIME didn't change
this one bit.

Well, gosh. I stand corrected; I should have read RFC 822 before
making that decision (back whenever it was). I can only assume
that I had based it on what I thought was allowed in mail before
RFC822. If I had been designing SMTP I wouldn’t have allowed all
128 ASCII characters. The first 8 would have been forbidden, for
a start. Then we could have used ETX to mark the end of the
body, and not <CRLF>.<CRLF>, which can legitimately appear in a
text message. But I wasn’t, so they weren’t and we couldn’t. Oh
well.

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 
Jon(_dot_)Fairbairn(_at_)cl(_dot_)cam(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk


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