[exim] Handling malformed header fields

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Author: Murray S. Kucherawy
Date:  
To: exim-users@exim.org
Subject: [exim] Handling malformed header fields
This might be more appropriate for exim-dev, but I'll start here.

I'm working on drafting a Best Current Practices RFC for MTA behaviours beyond what the basic message format RFCs require (RFC5322 in particular). I've already queried what Sendmail, postfix and a few commercial MTAs do in some specific cases, and I'm curious to know what exim does so I can add its data to the survey.

The two cases that have been most interesting so far are:

--
From: foo@bar
To: baz@blivit
This is not a header field
Subject: ha ha I fooled you
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:08:22 -0700

This is where the body is
--

...and

--
From: foo@bar
To: baz@blivit
MIME-Version : 1.0
Subject: did you notice that extra space?
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:08:22 -0700

This is where the body is
--

Obviously the issue has to do with how exim handles the two malformations found on the third line of each; in the first case it's not a valid header field line, and in the second case there's a space before the colon following the header field name.

I could try this myself with an exim installation someplace but that might not reveal other logic that my tests don't activate, so I thought it better to query people with more intimate knowledge of exim's internals.

Thanks,
-MSK