On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, John Holman wrote:
> My guess is that there is no real standard, but I think it makes sense when
> passing a message to an MTA via stdin to comply with the conventions of the
> local operating system. That would mean LF under Unix, CRLF under Windows etc.
This seemed to me to be obvious, and not even worth thinking about, when
I first implemented Exim. Clearly it isn't as obvious to some people.
I added the -dropcr option in a hurry later, to help out someone who had
this problem. It was done the way it is ("throw away ALL CRs") because
that is trivial to implement, whereas "throw away ONE CR if it precedes
LF" is more complicated. Besides, I was a a bit grumbly about it.
> Actually, if it's true that there are no standards to be upheld, I also
> think it would be better for Exim (which claims to be a Sendmail clone
> insofar as the command line interface is concerned) to accept either CRLF
> or LF as a line terminator when mail is presented on standard input, if
> that is what Sendmail does.
I never claimed it to be a clone! It tries to implement the majority of
commonly-used command line options in a compatible way.
Cyrus appears to be becoming widely used. I should probably do something
better in Exim 4. I will investigate changing -dropcr to make it mean
"turn CRLF into LF" instead of what it currently does, and I will also
add a configure file option to force it always to be on. (And I'll see
if I can find any Sendmail documentation on this subject.)
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
