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TIL: In the year 2016, twenty-two years after the publication of "The UNIX-HATERS Handbook"[1], sendmail still finds it necessary, upon discovering the word "fr
by rsfinn 10y ago
TIL: In the year 2016, twenty-two years after the publication of "The UNIX-HATERS Handbook"[1], sendmail still finds it necessary, upon discovering the word "from" at the beginning of a line in the body of a mail message, to replace it with the string ">From".
[1] http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
- davexunit 10y agoI was wondering what was up with that. Thanks for the history lesson.
- jjnoakes 10y agoThe real bug is not the replacement (the quoting), but the failure to reverse it (unquote) at the proper times. (The From to >From quoting design itself can be argued to be a poor decision, but that is orthogonal to the issue of why >From appears in random places. If the unquoting was done properly by all systems involved, there would be no >From in the wild).
- mwcampbell 10y agoThe global complexity would be lower if the mbox format, which IIUC is what makes that quoting necessary, would just die already. We've only had Maildir for about 20 years now.
- jjnoakes 10y agoMaybe, maybe not. There's quoting everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Doing it wrong is the source of some extremely damaging exploits (SQL injection, shell command injection, XSS, ...). Fixing From and >From is but a drop in the bucket.