Re: [evolution-patches] fix for bug #44457

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 07:37, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> since the mail-format.c code didn't know how to handle video/* types, it
> had gnome-vfs sniff it. gnome-vfs told us it was text/x-troff-man and so
> we tried to display it as text. since the content->rawtext bit was not
> set, we assumed it was already in UTF-8 and so didn't bother to convert
> - crash.
> 
> the camel portion of the patch changes rawtext to just raw and makes it
> default to TRUE so that application/octet-stream, etc parts have this
> bit set always. the change from rawtext to raw could be undone, I mostly
> just did it because the name "rawtext" isn't really appropriate for
> non-textual parts.

But it only has meaning for textual parts.  All other parts, by
definition, are and can only be raw.  Textual parts can be un-raw if
they're converted to utf8 - something you can't do for non-textual
parts.  So all of that should be reverted, otherwise it confuses the
meaning of the flag.

(and maybe another reason this logic should be moved up)

> the mailer patch fixes it so that we don't sniff a mime part unless it
> was declared as application/octet-stream (any other mime type doesn't
> make sense to sniff, since presumably the declared mime-type is
> correct).

I dont understand what the format/flowed text/plain check is for.  If
we're already in that bit of code, we've already decided that the text
is plain text, or should be treated as such.

The check for application/octet-stream seems ok.

> another way (smaller patch) to fix this bug would be to make it so that
> handle_text_plain() checked the actualy mime-type of the part and if it
> was not text/*, then set content->rawtext to TRUE, but that seemed like
> an ugly hack so I opted for the slightly larger fix, but which seemed
> like the more correct fix.

This doesn't make sense anyway.

The part is already supposed to have been identified by then.


The important bug is a crash in the display code anyway.  A "DOS"
attack, e.g. if someone passes such a mail with text/plain as the
content-type, it'll still crash/abort.  Displaying rubbish is a bit
untidy, but crashing is serious.