Re: [Sheflug] VM/XEMacs and rewritten headers.

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Barrie" == Barrie Bremner <TheEnglishman [at] ecosse.net> writes:

    Barrie> I'm a fan of systems that stay utterly broken until you
    Barrie> actually sort it to spec - gives me an incentive to
    Barrie> actually learn the system a little better :-)

You'll get along with Kyle (VM's author), then.  My only proposed
patch to VM was rejected out of hand because it made life less painful
for the recipients of broken mail.  Kyle said, "well, if I do that,
they'll have no incentive to complain to their correspondents."  :-)

But the RFCs for mail specifically say "comply strictly in what you
produce, be lenient in what you accept."  This is for two reasons.
First, Microsoft et al are incapable of parsing, let alone complying
with, standards.  Second, often the boundary cases can be assigned
useful behavior, although we don't know what it is yet.  It is not a
good idea to specify things so tightly that you must write a new
standard and abandon the old one to make progress.

Third, the spec isn't very well written for a hostile environment
containing spammers, etc.  It was written for the old "friendly user"
environment, in the days when most of the world's top sysadmins knew
each other by name, and met each other at Usenix.

    Barrie> I'm pretty impressed by the fact that Qmail 1.03 is now
    Barrie> something like 2 years old, and still perfectly
    Barrie> servicable.

Excellent design.  Two principles:  (1) implement the RFCs (mostly 821
and parts of 1123).  (2) Within that constraint, provide simple,
robust, secure service.  Note that the last three are more or less
different names for the same thing.



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