Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!nosc!logicon.com!Makey
From: Makey@Logicon.COM (Jeff Makey)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: Wanted: Messed-Up Mail Headers
Message-ID: <765@logicon.com>
Date: 10 Sep 90 19:07:45 GMT
References: <63881@bu.edu.bu.edu> <3301@decuac.DEC.COM> <63938@bu.edu.bu.edu>
Organization: Future Procrastinators of America
Lines: 18

In article <63938@bu.edu.bu.edu> beh@bass.bu.edu (Bruce E. Howells) writes:
>Basically, my concern is that this thing not read in a piece of mail, try
>to parse it, choke, die, and lose the user's mail...

Ordinary good coding practices should take care of these types of
problems.  If you assume that lines may be infinitely long, and may
contain characters of *any* of the 256 possible values (including
ASCII NUL), then you should be protected from memory faults and
surprise truncations.  After that, insist that all errors detected
during parsing be handled in some sane manner.

Unfortunately, this is a lot easier to say than to do.

                           :: Jeff Makey

Department of Tautological Pleonasms and Superfluous Redundancies Department
    Disclaimer: Logicon doesn't even know we're running news.
    Internet: Makey@Logicon.COM    UUCP: {nosc,ucsd}!logicon.com!Makey