Bug hunt

* * * * *

Bug hunt

It wasn't so easy to patch [1].

Email headers can technically span multiple lines, although the mailing list
software I'm using doesn't actually support headers that span multiple lines.

And thus breakage.

The email I sent to the affected mailing list I run went into a bit more
detail (more, I'm sure, than the members cared to know):

> From: Sean Conner <[email protected]>
> To: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
> Subject: [dss] Mailing list woes
> Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:43:02 -0500 (EST)
>
> Okay, you didn't ask for it, but you got it anyway.
>
> What exactly was going on with the mailing list software, and why were the
> messages so funky to begin with?
>
> The mailing list software I'm using has a few features that I like:
>
> 1. it's simple.
> 2. it's simple to install (this is a very important part).
> 3. it works.
>
> I started using it back in the mid-90s but I think it's a few years older
> than that even. It was written way back before there existed a stardardized
> method for sending files via email [1], so it never had the ability to
> handle attachtments, nor, as it turned out, HTML (HyperText Markup
> Language) formatted email.
>
> In the mid-90s, a standard was created for the sending of multi-media based
> emails—MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). Not only did it allow
> a way to send attachtments, but it also allowed email messages to contain
> both a plain text version and a formatted version of an email (say, using
> HTML or even Microsoft Word Doc). This was done by adding some extentions
> to the headers of the email, which change the way the email client
> processes the body of the message.
>
> The mailing list software, did not know about these headers, so it didn't
> preserve these headers and thus, you got funky looking email. [2]
>
> So all I needed to do was preserve the required headers and bam! The
> mailing list software would automatically support all this MIME crap [7]
> and everybody would be happy and be able to actually read the messages.
>
> Only, preserving said lines wasn't as easy as I expected.
>
> You see, the headers in an email message are name/value pairs:
>
> > From: Lorie Davis <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
> > To: The Dragonslayers Society <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
> > Subject: Are we done yet?
> > Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:43:02 -0500
> >
>
> but the email standard states that a header can actually span multiple
> lines:
>
> > From: Lorie Davis <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
> > To: The Dragonslayers Society <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
> > Subject: Have you finished using me as an example?
> > Mime-Version: 1.0
> > Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
> > boundary="—-=_Part_44704_28465339.1168636054704"
> > Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:07:34 -0500
> >
>
> (note how the Content-Type header spans multiple lines) Now, not all
> headers span multiple lines, but it is allowed by the email standard. But
> the mailing list software didn't allow for multiple lines per header, and
> for the headers it was originally interested in, were never really split
> across multiple lines.
>
> I found this out the hard way.
>
> The way the code was originally written made it difficult (read: damn near
> impossible) to support multiline headers. So it required a bit of rewriting
> to make this all work.
>
> So, why not just install some modern mailing list software? See rule #2
> above? Have you seen what's required to install modern mailing list
> software? At least a 2GHz machine to start off with. A score of libraries.
> And now I'm treading into the scripting lauguage du jour as well.
>
> Believe me, it was easier to patch the existing mailing list software than
> to install something new (which basically, would require updating my entire
> server, which is something I refuse to do, seeing how it works and is
> secure as is—and I'll stop here before I start ranting on the whole upgrade
> culture).
>
> -spc (Who still uses 486s)
>
> [ 1] EMAIL is NOT FTP (File Transfer Protocol)!
> [ 1] Sorry.
>
> [ 1] I was never one for sending files via email, as there are better, more
> efficient and faster ways of doing that. What no one (and by “no one”
> I mean those that aren't programmers) seems to realize that when you
> send a file through email, the file has to be converted to text, least
> a lot of email software along the way blows up. This conversion
> process inceases the file size by at least a third (so a file that's
> 3M now becomes an attachtment 4M in size).
>
> [ 1] But it's damned convenient [3][5], so everybody does it.
>
> [ 1] Well, except me. But I'm not your typical user to begin with.
>
> [ 1] Anyway …
>
> [ 2] Not that I minded—that's how I receive such messages, even though my
> the email client I now use understands the MIME headers. Yes, what you
> were seeing was the raw message body itself, in all its bloated HTML
> glory that every email client seems to bloody default to these days
> [3].
> [ 3] Thank you so very much, Microsoft. [4]
> [ 4] May you rot in Hell.
> [ 5] Thank you so very much, University of Washington. [4][6]
> [ 6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(e-mail_client)
> [ 7] That's a technical term.
>

If I come across as a curmudgeon, then yes, I don't like the fact that people
send files via email (reguardless of how convenient it is) nor do I like HTML
formatted email (if plain text is good enough for me, then gosh darn it's
good enough for you!) so quite a bit of this is just me blowing off some
steam.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2007/01/07.1

Email author at [email protected]