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

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> Acceping busted stuff doesn't mean you are breaking standards,
    jb> producing it means you are breaking them.

Au contraire.  Sendmail is a filter, ie, when sendmail accepts those
headers, it is by definition producing busted mail, because sendmail
is useless without an MUA.

When a standard says "MUST NOT", that means that implementations
should be free to optimize.  (VM's author takes that freedom
seriously, sufficiently seriously that he rejected on principle a
patch I submitted to add MIME headers to headerless Japanese mail
conveniently.)  Theoretically, MUAs shouldn't have to worry about
non-ASCII crap in the headers; parsing RFC-822 (to generate reply
addresses and do threading and so on) is hard enough without trying to
accomodate seriously broken stuff.  But the "it's not my problem,
sendmail is not a header verifier" attitude means that you have to.

So basically, you've broken the standard in the sense that saying
"MUST" and "MUST NOT" now denote _options_.  You may not be violating
the letter of the standard, but the standard is not whole anymore.

BTW, the argument that people would lose mail if it were refused is
bogus; that mail can't be properly handled except by a mechanism like
SMTP which provides routing out of band.  Since sendmail does have
that information, it can return the mail and say "send it back after
you've fixed it."  On the other hand, if you send mail to someone who
doesn't have a Japanese mailer, you basically haven't given them a
usable return address.  Now the shoe's on the other foot.

The fact is that no mail need be lost by returning it, and there are
plausible situations where the mail is guaranteed to be partially
unusable on delivery.  So the issue is really that people blame other
people with unusual needs (like Tony) for being different.  Everybody
wants the other guy to adjust.  And the sinful conformists are the
great majority, virtuous oddballs rare.  Guess who wins.  :-(

I recognize that makes the politics of your situation impossible,
Jonathan.  That's unfortunate.  But please try to be PC while you're
brown-nosing the customers and management. ;-)

    jb> Outlook Express, for example, doesn't seem to have any
    jb> problems with reading just about anything,

As long as it's Japanese.  What happens with German, hmm?  "Have a
little kanji with your sauerkraut, sir."

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