Re: [apps-discuss] Review of: draft-ietf-appsawg-malformed-mail-03

[Ned Freed <[e-mail]>]

> >This is going to take a lot more than three paragraphs to do properly. I'd
> >suggest something like this (apologies in advance - this is *very* rough, but
> >I'm in the middle of an office move and don't have time right now to wordsmith
> >the text the way I normally would):

> Way better than what I sent.

FWIW, I agree completely with everything you said, and I hope it's reflected
in what I wrote.

> >But more to the point, lots of software, including metamail, the original MIME
> >software, pays no attention to MIME-Version: at all. And the chances of this
> >changes are, IMO, remote.

> I use Alpine which is one of the very few MUAs that take Murray's
> advice and ignore MIME headers if the MIME-Version is missing.  It is
> a pain in the patoot, since it is invariably wrong.  I ended up using
> procmail to add the missing header to mail from known screwups like
> the NY Times so I could read it properly.

NYT? Wow. I hadn't noticed they were one of the places that does it. The
example I usually think of is one of the sources of political spam^H^H^H^H
legitimate bulk mail which seems to do it intermittently. But that's
nowhere near as good as example as the NYT.

Another amusing thing one of these bulk email generators does is put out
multiparts marked with a quoted-printable CTE. (The multipart is not, in fact
encoded, although there have been other cases in the past where it was.) I
don't know if this one is worth calling out in the doc or not.

				Ned