On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 05:31:17PM +0100, Simon Williams wrote:
> * On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 04:58:02PM +0100, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
[...]
> > If a line starts with a dot, you prepend another, what*EVER* comes after
> > it. (something which the participants in the very recent thread appeared
> > to be unaware of)
> Odd. RFC2821 specifies that message data should end with
> "<CRLF>.<CRLF>", so any line beginning with a dot and containing
> another character other than the <CRLF> pair shouldn't be treated as
> signifying the end of message data.
[...]
It is not that odd if you think about it:
* Dot-escaping is done to be able to send messages which contain a
line consisting only of single dot.
* It has to be possible to easily undo the escaping before final
delivery.
If you only replaced "." with ".." but would leave ".." unchanged
you'd end up with a line ".." in both cases and could not distinguish
whether somebody sent "." or "..".
cu andreas