Re: tlug: re: fetchmail flushes flushing Laszlo's career down the drain

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

Selva Nair (selva@example.com) wrote:

> >  I also think that, while such a task force is building up 
> >  strength and creating its database, Linux folks need to 
> >  devise a way to be as lenient as the other OSes in this regard. 
> 
> You wont get many takers for that.  When "lenient" means breaking the
> standards, the party wont go on for long.

Acceping busted stuff doesn't mean you are breaking standards, producing
it means you are breaking them.  Outlook Express, for example, doesn't
seem to have any problems with reading just about anything, but Steve
could give us a good rant about things that are wrong with what it
produces.  From a standards standpoint, that's were the problem lies.
As the saying goes, "Be liberal in what you accept, but conservative
in what you produce."  Even if your incoming mail was produced by a
product whose author never heard of an RFC, it's best if your system
can nevertheless accept it, only returning it it just can't decipher it.

If we returned all the mail that generates a "postmaster warning"
message because it has a malformed (read "double-byte")From: header,
the flow would be huge, and a great many people would not be getting
all of their mail.

Of course, from a technical standpoint I would like to be able
to do that, but from a business standpoint it's simply not
possible.  Now if I were a sysadmin at a university and had kind of
a captive audience and could put on a Bastard Operator From Hell
cap and leave it on, that might be different  ;-)

JonathaN

-- 
Jonathan Byrne                                      Engineering Division
Exodus Communications K.K./Global Online Japan      http://www.gol.com/
Tel:  +81 3-5334-1700   Fax: +81 3-5334-1702        Direct: +81 3-5334-1756

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