From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Fri Mar 15 2002 - 05:44:25 MST
On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Simon McClenahan wrote:
> If you did this deliberately, then I would like to bitch back at you,
Of course I did that deliberately. I wasn't even nice enough to put an end
at the end of my message, thus screwing up the rest of the list digest
subscribers who also happen to be Outlook users.
begin if you're an MS Outlook user, you can't read this. The suggested
"fix" from Microsoft is to not use begin followed by two spaces at the
beginning of the the line. I kid you not, that's an official "fix".
end
> quit your whining, get a 21st century MUA that can render in-process or
> with an external plug-in or utility, HTML or MIME attachments with
> quoted-printable text, etc.
You misunderstood the entire point of my diatribe. I don't render rich
content (Redmond even managed to sneak buffer overrun vulnerabilities into
their frigging RTF processing code) as default as a matter of privacy and
security. (And, yes, the question of filtering and sandboxing is
undecidedable, and a waste of my time).
If people don't talk to me in plain text they obviously don't want to talk
to me.
> If you did not do this deliberately, then to answer your question, most
> mail readers (like Outlook Express) that send unformatted text are
> configured to wrap lines when the message is sent. Some filtering may
Um, so does my mailer. However, it
doesn'tbreakoverlongtextlinessuchasthose,whichisveryobviouslythecorrectproceduretodoandnotwhatMSOutlookandafewotherbraindeadMUAsdo.
An URI is just a special case for this.
Meaning, if your MUA does this, it's broken. Simple enough.
> occur with the mailing list software (majordomo?) but I doubt it.
> Detection is usually not a general pattern-matching expression for a
> URI, but specifically email addresses with an "@" or anything that
> starts with http:, mailto:, file:, ftp:, or ends with known TLD's like
> .com . The pattern matching is of course implemented differently in each
> MUA renderer. A smart one would be able to join the split lines back up.
The pattern matching is not the problem of my MUA. It's the problem of the
text buffer renderer (I don't know whether it's Sawmill, Gnome or xterm
doing this, but it works). Kitchen-sink approaches such as DEIOP are Bad
Design.
> You obviously don't have a smart enough MUA (and neither do I,
> apparently) I get around wrapped "earls" with the classic
The question of wrapped URIs is undecidedable. It requires a human mind to
fix a preventable problem. I don't want my MUA come with a built-in mind.
I want something which renders plain text messages. Which would run on a
32 MByte wearable, and render directly to an array of luminous pixels in
my hud.
> copy/paste/alt-tab/click/mouse-movement method (or learn your keyboard
> shortcuts for mouseless navigation of applications and text editing).
Wrong attitude. I have a computer, I don't have to cut&paste, and to edit
the URIs. I've shown above why the brokenness is at the end of earl
wrappers, not at my end. I don't have any possible use for wrapped earls.
> Looking at the mail headers of Brian's message, there is no X-Mailer:
> header which is a de facto standard for specifying the MUA used to
Where is the RFC requiring that to be inserted? Why do I need to specify
my MUA, so that you can select the proper exploit from the vulnerabilities
library? I think not.
> compose the message. Your message has no X-Header either. That tells me
> that either Majordomo mangled it, or the message was composed on a Web
> interface that does not fill in the X-Mailer: header, or that both you
Nope.
> and Brian have lame MUA's and should think about upgrading to something
> more modern.
Yes. I'm upgrading to mutt (currently pine user), as soon as I can get the
DSL home box finder to work. The next evolution of this is a web front end
to a SQL database containing a few millions of individual mails. It's just
that this would take more time to set up than I have. In case anyone here
has created something like this for their private use or know of any such
solutions, please drop me a pointer.
> HTH.:-P
EHFD, FOAD. HAND ;P
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:12:58 MST