Yeah, you know? I think i was on crack yesterday - too much staring
at CNN all night long. I agree it's the client which does the munging
and not the MTA. The RFCs (822/2822) recommend that clients don't
generate lines longer than 76 chars, but it's not required.
About Eudora and InternetConfig... I was just reading the IC docs this
morning. There is an extention which comes with IC called ICeTEe which
patches TextEdit in the OS, enabling any app which uses TextEdit
(including Eudora) to pass Cmd-clicked URLs to helper apps using IC.
I haven't tried it, because NiftyTelnet and NewsWatcher handle the
clicks via IC on there own, and I no longer use Eudora.
Kris Feldmann
Thus wrote Marc Sira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 20:06:38 -0700
> From: Marc Sira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (Duo/2400 List)
> Subject: [Duo2400] Re: Mail clients and long lines
>
> >The Mail Transport Agent (mail server) is supposed to wrap long lines
> >and makes no attempt to read the content it's wrapping.
>
> MTAs aren't supposed to wrap or otherwise mung long lines, and they don't. You can
>test this by mailing yourself some long lines on your Unix box and looking directly
>at your mail spool file ("vi $MAIL"). There's a philosophical divide on whether MTAs
>or firewall intermediaries should even do things like filter for VBscript viruses and
>the like (personally I don't think it's their job, but realistically you can save
>yourself and your Windows-trapped users a lot of trouble if you do it).
>
> An MTA may truncate an extremely long line where it would otherwise cause a buffer
>overflow during the SMTP MAIL command, however. Such lines aren't supposed to be in
>mail, meaning that it's the client job to wrap, MIME-quote, or otherwise encode them.
>
> >Most mail
> >clients don't unwrap lines (and shouldn't). Many Mac apps can take
> >advantage of Internetconfig, allowing one to "click" on links (wrapped
> >or not) and pass them off to the specified helper app. Try this rather
> >than copy/paste. For example, I read and write email in NiftyTelnet,
> >which as far as the Mac is concerned, is not an email program at all.
> >It does hand off URLs to Internetconfig, however, which works very
> >nicely.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "unwrap" - a mail client shouldn't delete newlines, of
>course, but they can certainly wrap lines or do anything else they want to outgoing
>(Eudora does by default, but it's settable like practically everything else in
>Eudora). They could also wrap long lines to display them nicely (or sometimes not so
>nicely), though Eudora doesn't do that. A POP mail client could handle this as the
>message was being received and before writing it to disk, which is perhaps why you
>felt that the MTA was doing it. Also, list server remailing software like that which
>handles this list may (and frequently does) mung messages in all kinds of nasty ways.
>Unfortunately. I expect this was the source of the original issue someone had with
>split URLs.
>
> I'm not sure that Internet Config itself handles URLs, but it does provide an easy
>way for a programmer to find out which app to send them to at runtime. One of the
>nicer things on the Mac, really (would that more cool third-party innovations like
>that were incorporated by Apple into the OS). Eudora unfortunately still doesn't use
>it (as of version 4, anyway), instead prompting and saving an alias ("alis" resource)
>to the preferred handler for each URL type, which often isn't such a great thing when
>you often read your mailbox over an Appleshare mount.
>
> --
> Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
>
>
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