On Sun, 14 Feb 1999, Oliver Smith wrote:
> To: Work: Jim <jims@email>,
> Home: Bob <bobs@email>
>
> 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.
Um, no. Different headers have different syntax. The form above is
incorrect syntax when in address headers, To/Cc/Bcc/Reply-To/From (and
all those with Resent- in front, and couple of others). It would be
hopelessly incorrect in the Date: header. Subject: is free-form. Etc.
> 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.
I have no idea what you mean about accuracy. You can be as accurate as
necessary.
> 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), 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
Does "the offending mailers" refer to software or humans?
Pardon me if you've answered this already, but are you receiving these
strange address fields as submissions from local users, which your exim is
supposed to send out, or are they coming in from an outside SMTP source
for you to deliver or relay?
The solution is different depending which case is involved. If they're
your own users, then you're going to be much better off in the long run if
you educate them about the problem (or get them better software if their
user agent is generating that bogosity for them).
--
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