Quoth Oliver Smith on Sun, Feb 14, 1999:
> I mentioned that I was seeing errors from people sending out Emails with
> headers along the lines of:
>
> To: Work: Jim <jims@email>,
> Home: Bob <bobs@email>
>
> and Exim wasn't liking this; although I could see why this is technically an
> error, I wondered if it was something I could specifically turn off.
>
> The (brief) discussion bounced this off as breaking RFC 822.
>
> Unfortunately; according to RFC 822, I should have received none of the
> replies. All the subject lines began with the three letters Re:, and most of
> your received headers had colons in them too.
Have you actually _read_ RFC822? If you read it carefully, you
will see that the "Subject:" header allows colons.
> Making Exim pick up these errors is obviously an overhead (since it requires
> a more complex rule), and it's not applied with any degree of accuracy.
Even if you make Exim check for any errors in the headers, you
can do it accurately, catching every non-RFC822-compliant thing.
> The trouble is that I want most of the rest of the errors that header syntax
> checking detects, but unless the offending mailers start quoting the textual
> part of usernames (which is a bad habbit they probably picked up from older
> versions of Elm),
Most of the mailers know what to quote. For example, pine (which
I don't use) has an addressbook, which has separate fields for
e-mail, real name, and other data. If a mailer can't quote what
is needed, it's broken.
__
/ \
\__/ (Period.)
> we're going to end up with a lot (big numbers) of
> frustrated end-users out there who are trying to figure out what's wrong
> with the _email address_ part of
>
> Work: john@??? <john@???>
> instead of
> "Work: john@???" <john@???>
>
> Your average-to-majority user is going to think "But I even got it right
> twice????".
My average user must just write:
To: john@???
without adding anything, unless he/she wants to add the real
name. If my average user wants to add the real name of the
person, he/she must either look at the received mail, or use some
kind of address book of his mailer. If he gets it wrong, it's
not my fault -- don't write the headers if you don't know what
should be there.
Vadik.
--
The ill-formed Orange
Fails to satisfy the eye:
Segmentation fault.
--
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