Michael Holzt wrote:
It is general consensus that "SHOULD NOT" has to be interpreted as "You must be nuts to do that, think not only twice but at least ten times
about it, and be sure that you know all bad outcomes out of this. Please
do not do it."
Empty messages (no data at all) are irretrievably broken. There is no diagnostic information available in the message (since there isn't one). The only "data" is the Return-Path (and the IP connection from the server logs). This is exactly like passing a null pointer to a function; the function should check for null and return immediately (and throw an error if appropriate).
AFAICT, the only reason for an empty data segment is a broken server or a spammer performing a very inefficient dictionary attack. It is, as far as I know, impossible to construct such a message using normal MUA's.
However, I just checked and at least ezmlm will accept a completely null message to the special moderate addresses, so I withdraw my proposal to add this to the core. I will however, add the zero size test to the check_basicheaders plugin that Jim Winstead proposed and commit that to CVS.
John
