4 ms·

> There are many distribution protocols are that less primitive and absolutely will mutilate the formatting of your documents, such as email (which is why there

by u801e 9y ago

> There are many distribution protocols are that less primitive and absolutely will mutilate the formatting of your documents, such as email (which is why there are email attachments). That's not entirely true. For email, the only characters that have special meaning are carriage return, line feed, period, and the null ASCII character. Other than that, you can transfer data via SMTP without any issues.

austincheney 9y ago
That might be true in theory but it certainly isn't true in practice. I know because I have done this work before. Documents passed through email tend to get mutilated by each application that touches it, such as: email servers, user agent applications, and sometimes network proxies and other application tools on the line. Microsoft applications were huge offenders, particularly MS Exchange which added all kinds of crap to the document. The worst was webmail, which is an email client embedded in a web page. The documents would have to be mutilated so that contents didn't leak outside of a bounded area on the page and visually kill any advertisements or other controls on the page. If you embed HTML in email and then embed other grammars inside the HTML these applications will brutalize your document at every step. If you are fortunate and extremely defensive your document arrive at a first destination mostly undamaged, but after that any retransmission will thoroughly crush its soul.
- u801e 9y ago
  > That might be true in theory but it certainly isn't true in practice. I know because I have done this work before. My testing was limited to three commercial SMTP servers that I had credentials for. One of them was the SMTP server that I could access using my Hotmail account credentials. Other than changing the Message-Id header that I had manually set in the test message I was sending, I wasn't able to to see any other changes in the message that I had sent (a string of ASCII characters (0-255) excluding the ones I noted in my previous reply). On the other hand, I have no idea what MAPI does with text. After re-reading your original post, it appears that you're taking applications and the transfer protocol as a single unit rather than separating them out. If you use protocols like HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, or NNTP over telnet, you'll find that they don't typically mangle text (bytes) that you send outside of certain control characters like I mentioned above. But you're definitely correct about the problems that applications pose in terms of preserving the text that they process.
  - austincheney 9y ago
    Try putting HTML with some exotic CSS (inline of course because this is email). Ensure that CSS contains some position absolutes and other properties that allows presentation outside the accepted bounds. Also put some JavaScript in there and see what it does. I guarantee Hotmail will destroy the original document and do so in such a way that the document evolves from machine that touches the document. The document, from the perspective of SMTP 821/281/5321 (and so forth) is still just plain text.
    - u801e 9y ago
      > I guarantee Hotmail will destroy the original document [containing HTML/CSS and/or JavaScript] and do so in such a way that the document evolves from machine that touches the document. I'm not disagreeing with you here and you're most likely correct. Exchange has historically not complied with SMTP RFCs. I'll try it out and see how it changes just to satisfy my curiosity. I suspect that you were to send email like you specified through Postfix, Sendmail, or Exim, it wouldn't be altered before being sent to the next MTA or delivered to the user's mailbox.

by u801e 9y ago

austincheney 9y ago

That might be true in theory but it certainly isn't true in practice. I know because I have done this work before. Documents passed through email tend to get mutilated by each application that touches it, such as: email servers, user agent applications, and sometimes network proxies and other application tools on the line. Microsoft applications were huge offenders, particularly MS Exchange which added all kinds of crap to the document. The worst was webmail, which is an email client embedded in a web page. The documents would have to be mutilated so that contents didn't leak outside of a bounded area on the page and visually kill any advertisements or other controls on the page. If you embed HTML in email and then embed other grammars inside the HTML these applications will brutalize your document at every step. If you are fortunate and extremely defensive your document arrive at a first destination mostly undamaged, but after that any retransmission will thoroughly crush its soul.

u801e 9y ago
> That might be true in theory but it certainly isn't true in practice. I know because I have done this work before. My testing was limited to three commercial SMTP servers that I had credentials for. One of them was the SMTP server that I could access using my Hotmail account credentials. Other than changing the Message-Id header that I had manually set in the test message I was sending, I wasn't able to to see any other changes in the message that I had sent (a string of ASCII characters (0-255) excluding the ones I noted in my previous reply). On the other hand, I have no idea what MAPI does with text. After re-reading your original post, it appears that you're taking applications and the transfer protocol as a single unit rather than separating them out. If you use protocols like HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, or NNTP over telnet, you'll find that they don't typically mangle text (bytes) that you send outside of certain control characters like I mentioned above. But you're definitely correct about the problems that applications pose in terms of preserving the text that they process.
- austincheney 9y ago
  Try putting HTML with some exotic CSS (inline of course because this is email). Ensure that CSS contains some position absolutes and other properties that allows presentation outside the accepted bounds. Also put some JavaScript in there and see what it does. I guarantee Hotmail will destroy the original document and do so in such a way that the document evolves from machine that touches the document. The document, from the perspective of SMTP 821/281/5321 (and so forth) is still just plain text.
  - u801e 9y ago
    > I guarantee Hotmail will destroy the original document [containing HTML/CSS and/or JavaScript] and do so in such a way that the document evolves from machine that touches the document. I'm not disagreeing with you here and you're most likely correct. Exchange has historically not complied with SMTP RFCs. I'll try it out and see how it changes just to satisfy my curiosity. I suspect that you were to send email like you specified through Postfix, Sendmail, or Exim, it wouldn't be altered before being sent to the next MTA or delivered to the user's mailbox.