On Jan 7, ilya@??? (Ilya Ketris) wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jan 1997, Philip Hazel wrote:
>
> > It appears there are sites out there that terminate their replies to
> > SMTP commands with just LF rather than CRLF, as RFC 821 demands.
> > Furthermore, it appears that sendmail and smail are able to send
> > messages to such sites, whereas Exim can't, as it is following the RFC.
> > Under such pressure, I feel that I probably have to change Exim, but
> > what do others think? At least one Exim user supports it:
>
> Let's make this kind of liberal behaviour an option,
> which is not on by default in order to draw the
> postmaster's attention to nonconformant sites, and maybe
> let them know that talking their broken dialect of SMTP
> is a courtesy extended to them, not an obligation.
Never emit anything outside of the specs but always be liberal
when interpreting what you have as input.
That was a good idea when I learned to program in the early seventies
and it still is.
In this case it seems that you have a behaviour which even if outside
of the official spec's for email is certainly what many programmers would
consider "normal" or "correct" for most other applications using
ASCII lines delimitted with newlines.
Personally I wouldn't send out mail like this. But would accept it. And
as the sometimes administrator of a fairly large mail system certainly
don't want to have to deal with any complaints because it's not working.
Either from the customers or the software (except perhaps as a note
in the daily summary saying that N pieces of mail where accepted with
the wrong newline delimiter....)..
--
Stuart Lynne <sl@???> 604-933-1000 <http://www.poste.com>
PGP Fingerprint: 28 E2 A0 15 99 62 9A 00 88 EC A3 EE 2D 1C 15 68
