subject line anomaly

[David Relson]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 00:43:17 +0100
Matthias Andree wrote:

> David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> writes:
> 
> > Happy Thanksgiving to ye all!
> 
> Same to you.
> 
> Our "Thanksgiving" is earlier here in Germany, our "Erntedank" isn't a
> national holiday and depends on the church. The Catholic Church
> celebrates (facultatively) Erntedank on the first Sunday of October,
> the Protestants reportedly on St. Michael's day (Sept 29) or a Sunday
> in the vicinity.

Ours is "4th Thursday in November" to be precise.

...[snip]...

> the mail client apparently second guessed (wrongly) line endings. In
> the physically transported mail, only a CR LF sequence is the line
> ending. This is distorted somewhat because most if not all clients
> normalize mail line ends to the local line ends, i. e. they collapse
> CR LF sequences to a bare LF control character.
> 
> > A few days ago, there was a report of bogofilter's occasionally not
> > adding the X-Bogosity line to a message.  I wonder if the line might
> > be present, but the MUA didn't think it in the header.
> >
> > Anyhow, I thought y'all might be interested in this unexpected
> > event.
> 
> At the time when the passthrough mode was new, I wondered if we would
> want to prepend our finding to the head instead, IIRC we had trouble
> with mail that had
> 
> header
> header
> ...
> header
> <SP><CR><LF>
> body
> ...
> 
> i. e. had a non-blank line (with a space) between the message's header
> and body sections.
> 
> Mail like you describe violates RFC-2822. The proper way would be to
> RFC-2047 the header and encode =?US-ASCII?Q?=0D=0D=20?= (=20 could be
> _ instead).

'Tisn't the first such violation we've seen.  This case was handled
properly and doesn't require any fixing from us, which is nice!

> Anyways, IMO the mailer misbehaves if treating bare CR as the end of
> the header line.

Certainly, putting the X-Bogosity line at the beginning would have been
easier.  The normal practice seems to be delivery messages (like
"Received: from") at the beginning and other messages at the end.  I'm
happy that bogofilter is doing as intended.  Also, I've reported the
problem to the proper mailing list.

Cheers,

David