Re: Fractured forwarded mail

[Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>]

Background: Netscape Messenger sometimes sends messages containing:

[ normal headers ]
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.2) 
Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: "Peter Bloomfield" <PeterBloomfield@bellsouth.net>
Subject: [Fwd: blah blah]
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
  boundary="------------050405090708050605060309"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------050405090708050605060309
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit


--------------050405090708050605060309
Content-Type: message/rfc822;
  name="blah blah"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline;
  filename="blah blah"

and Balsa breaks this into two `messages', the first with the headers 
down to this point, and the second containing the balance of the 
message, including the terminating
--------------050405090708050605060309--
boundary.  The message is broken, as RFC 2046 specifies that the 
preamble (in this case the line `This is a multi-part message in MIME 
format.') must end with a blank line.

On 05/05/2003, Carlos Morgado wrote:
> 
> On 2003.05.05 04:33:58 +0100 Peter Bloomfield wrote:
> 
>> No, Carlos, libmutt isn't on crack--NSMessenger is sending a broken 
>> multipart message!  Libmutt is correct: the preamble is `discard-
>> text', which is `*(*text CRLF)', and:
>> 
> 
> ah, tkx for checking :) that sliped my mind :\
> 
>> 
>> So, do we patch libmutt to accommodate a broken NSM, or live with 
>> NSM-
>> forwarded messages being parsed as two?  ;-)
>> 
> 
> I don't think we can allow parsing of broken messages simply cause 
> that will
> mean misparsing correct messages.

But is breaking the malformed message into two seemingly unrelated 
parts the best response to its brokenness?

Peter