On Thu, Oct 06, 2011 at 10:56:16PM +0200, Latimerius wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 10:25 PM, Jim Graham <spooky1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Follow standards to be safe. ?Ignore them at your own risk. ?It's
> > that simple.
>
> While I agree it should be like this I will say Kostya has a point
> here. Five years ago I worked on an e-mail parser for an antivirus
> package. As it turned out, one of the most widely used MUAs, Outlook
> Express, is so insanely non-standard that there were numerous times
> when I asked myself if it was still just incompetence, or if it was
> broken deliberately.
I strongly suspect it's a combination of a LOT of both....
> However, you totally can't afford not to parse a message if a MUA
> does.
When we're talking about headers, that non-standard e-mail might not
ever make it as far as the MUA on the other end, and even if it
does, there is *NO* guarantee that it will be parsed correctly.
You can cry, scream, and stomp your feet about it all you want,
that won't change the fact that not everyone is going to give a
rat's ass about your non-standard crap.
It may get bounced by either end's MTA. The fact that some non-standard
POS is out there does NOT require the rest of the world to support it.
Maybe it will, and maybe it won't. If you follow standards, you're safe.
If you don't, you take your chances on the good will of the rest of the
world.
This reminds me of something an IBM rep told me when I was at my
first job out of college. I'd run into a non-standard problem
with their POS, AIX (which I'd been stuck with...not my choice
at the time). He said, "Just because the rest of the
world does something a certain way does NOT make it a standard[1]. WE
decided that OUR WAY is better. We're right, the rest of the world
is wrong, and WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE QUESTIONING IBM's
WAY OF DOING THINGS?"
A little later, their on-site systems engineer stopped by and
asked if I still had a problem I needed help with. I pointed at
the new NON-IBM BSD system on my desk and said, "Nope, not anymore....."
He grumbled something and walked off.
About that same time, we (a Fortune 10 company) were pushing really
hard on all of our vendors to follow standards or get the **** out
of our network...IBM included. We didn't care if they used proprietary
protocols internally, but externally, they HAD to follow standards
or get out. Some (like IBM) had protocol conversion hardware, but
they DID at least meet our demands. And at that time, we were FAR,
FAR from being the only ones making those demands. It was more or
less global among end-user companies. We were also looking various
products for at what was to eventually become 10Base-T. If any
product failed to state that they absolutely would follow the
standard, once finalized, and would replace their interim stuff
with fully-compliant equipment at that time, they were immediately
told to leave our building and NEVER come back. Security was
informed that reps from those companies were never to be allowed
back in the building.
Again, internally, do what you want. Standard, non-standard, whatever.
Externally, if you care about whether or not some site in the path
your data takes just dumps your non-standard crap onto the floor,
you'll follow standards. If you don't, you take your chances...even
if you're Mickeysoft.
Later,
--jim
[1] That is technically true...it may not have been a true standard,
but it was, at the very least, a {de facto} standard.
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