Re: draft-ietf-6man-uri-zoneid-02.txt

[Mark Andrews <[e-mail]>]

In message <[e-mail]>, Stuart Cheshire wr
ites:
> On 16 Jul, 2012, at 20:50, Mark Andrews wrote:
> 
> > Stuart,
> > 	your mail client botched the Content-type line generation.
> > You may want to report it.
> >
> > 	Content-type: image/png; x-unix-mode=0644; name=Whatis&#39;  
> > "?.png"=""
> > 	Content-transfer-encoding: base64
> > 	Content-disposition: inline; filename="What is &#39; ?.png"
> >
> > Mark
> 
> Mark, your tone sounds very confident that you're absolutely certain  
> that you know exactly what botched what, and whose fault it is.
> 
> I'll reserve judgement until I actually know what happened, but what  
> I can tell you is this: Viewing the outgoing TCP packets with  
> tcpflow, this is what my mail client sends on-the-wire to the SMTP  
> relay:
> 
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
> Content-Type: image/png;
> 	x-unix-mode=0644;
> 	name=What is &#39; ?.png
> Content-Disposition: inline;
> 	filename="What is &#39; ?.png"

Which isn't a syntactically valid Content-Type header (RFC 1341).
 
> By the time you received the email, Mark, it had been rewritten to  
> the form you showed. As to what intermediary (or intermediaries)  
> contributed to that rewriting, I do not yet know.

It may have been re-written but Garbage In - Garbage Out.
 
> It's ironic that this problem occurs in the midst of a discussion of  
> the problems of escaping and message framing. The reality seems to be  
> that unless we keep things supremely simple, we can't hope to have  
> all programmers get it right in all cases. If there's exactly one  
> valid form for a string, then maybe we can hope to have that  
> implemented properly. When there are different representations of the  
> same string in different contexts, the probability of everyone  
> getting it right in all contexts pretty much approaches zero.

It was slightly ironic.

> Slightly off-topic, I'm told that at least some mail clients  
> truncated my original email at the line "unintentionally leaked  
> through into the user interface."
> 
> As composed on my Mac, there was some introductory text, then two  
> images, then the bulk of the text, as it appears in the archive:
> 
> <http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ipv6/current/msg16128.html>
> 
> Apparently some mail clients turned the second chunk of body text  
> into an attachment.
> 
> I'm curious as to how widespread this issue is -- I might have to be  
> more careful about where I put images in my email messages in the  
> future.
> 
> Could people send me a quick private email saying what mail client  
> they use and whether it:
> 
> 1. Showed the entire message as I composed it with the two images  
> displayed in-line (like the archive).
> 2. Showed the entire text of the message, but with the two images as  
> attachments (Gmail shows it this way).
> 3. Showed only the first five paragraphs of text, with the two images  
> and remaining text as attachments.
> 
> I'll summarize results to the list.
> 
> Stuart Cheshire
> 
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
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