[Mailman-Developers] NULL characters in e-mail.

[Thomas Wouters]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2000 at 05:01:59PM -0700, Dan Mick wrote:

[about NUL's in message bodies]

> For instance, if indeed it was the MTA's violation, maybe it's only
> this one MTA, or one revision of the MTA, that had the bug.  So fixing
> MLMs would be the wrong thing to do.

We have a fair bit of problems with NUL characters in message bodies. Not
because our mailer rejects it, but quite the opposite: a large section of
the half-arsed SMTP servers for Windows can't handle it. Customers of ours
have a SMTP queue waiting for them when they dial in, one Sendmail is
started to deliver the queue, and the remote server crashes or freezes or
otherwise misbehaves while sending the mail with a NUL in it. And the queue
is not re-ordered, so any new mail is kept waiting, too. We end up doing a
lot of manual repair in those cases, either removing the messages or editing
them (usually the first, unless the customer wants to save the mail.)

Curiously enough, those NULs often come from similar half-arsed Windows MTAs
or perhaps MUAs ;P I don't think we can make assumptions about those NULs,
but it would probably be a good idea to mask them. I doubt Mailman itself
has any problems with the NULs, since Mailman is written in Python, and
Python handles NULs in strings just fine. The same goes for the archives.
The archives may look truncated when using some browser or MUA, but all the
data is in there just fine.

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>

Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!