[Gllug] Blank lines in email headers

[John Edwards]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 12:42:03PM +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 09:07:13PM +0000, John Edwards wrote:
<snip>
>> I have seen Novell GroupWise 6.5 insert a line containing just a
>> single tab character into the headers just above the "X-Mailer:"
>> line when it replied to email containing HTML. It messed up on
>> most email clients, but relaying via Amavis fixed it.
> 
> This behaviour is perverse, but it's within spec, and it's the MUAs
> which are wrong if they cannot handle it.
> 
> See RFC 2822, section 2.2.3.

The section also says that the "general rule" is that folded lines
should contain "not simply WSP characters".


The inserted line contained just a tab character and no other data,
as so the email clients took that as the end of the header, and so
missed out on the rest of the header (including the 'Content-Type:').

In most cases this meant the email was hard to read and attachments
were not detected correctly. Luckily 'mutt' was not effected.

Strictly speaking this is incorrect behaviour on the part of the
email client as section 2.1 of RFC 2822 says:
" The body is simply a sequence of characters that follows the
  header and is separated from the header by an empty line
  (i.e., a line with nothing preceding the CRLF)."


-- 
#---------------------------------------------------------#
|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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