Tuesday, September 11, 2001
Yet more reasons to lookout for Outlook
I tried sending Spring the following email:
To: XXXXXX@springdew.com
From: XXXX@conman.org
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 03:42:07 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Greg's Geocities Site
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/4891/
-spc
It seems that Lookout (another fine Microsoft product) had problems with that email. All Spring got was:
To: XXXXXX@springdew.com
From: XXXX@conman.org
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 03:42:07 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Greg's Geocities Site
-spc
Nice, eh?
Of course, in talking with Spring about it, she's of the opinion that this isn't a Lookout problem, as it's happened with someone else we know when he sent email to a mailing list.
Actually, now that I think of it, I think what's happening is that Lookout (and the mailing list software) is not RFC 822 compliant. Or at least, it gets a few details wrong. The line of text can be interpreted at a header line, but the email headers are separated by a blank line:
3.1. GENERAL DESCRIPTION A message consists of header fields and, optionally, a body. The body is simply a sequence of lines containing ASCII charac- ters. It is separated from the headers by a null line (i.e., a line with nothing preceding the CRLF).
§ 3.1 of RFC 822
What the programs in question seem to be doing is looking for the first line that doesn't seem to be a header line, and ignoring blank lines altogether.
You know, there are standards for a reason … [As I was writing this entry, I sent another test to Spring, making the first line appear to be a header line. She got the message as I sent it. Perhaps Lookout is explicitely looking for H-T-T-P-: … ]