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> 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
by 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 agoTry 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.