Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site brl-tgr.ARPA Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!brl-tgr!tgr!Murray.pa@XEROX.ARPA From: Murray.pa@XEROX.ARPA Newsgroups: net.mail.headers Subject: Names with spaces Message-ID: <10928@brl-tgr.ARPA> Date: Wed, 22-May-85 16:10:01 EDT Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.10928 Posted: Wed May 22 16:10:01 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 24-May-85 20:59:38 EDT Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA Lines: 57 A month or so ago, Bruce sent an innocent msg to INFO-NETS that caused a lot of confusion. It seems as though lots of systems out there crashed every half-hour or so whenever MC tried to (re)transmit Bruces' msg on to them. The error message was something like "no closing quote". I think some systems can't tolerate mismatched quotes in the From field of the header, and MC managed to drop one. I think the From line looked like this when it left here: From: "Bruce A. Hamilton.OsbuSouth"@Xerox.ARPA The line that was killing CIT-VAX was: From: Can anybody fill me in on the fine print? Is there something special about the From line, or will any header line containing mismatched quotes cause the same problem? Any reason why it crashes the system instead of logging a message and blundering on? The only victim I've been in contact with is CIT-VAX. I think they are running a vanilla 4.2BSD. How many other systems got cought by the same bug? Did your system crash? Is there a reasonable bug fix? Any hope of fixing MC? ... Sending mail that crashes systems is high on my list of things not to do, especially when you can kill many systems with only one message. Currently, I have a filter installed that rejects any outgoing msg if the From field needs quoting. Is that good enough? (If you want a test case, just let me know.) ----- Part of our mail system makes heavy use of spaces in names. I'm getting a lot of flak about rejecting all these messages. We started seriously using quoted names with spaces early this year. There were various bugs that had to be fixed, both here and at other sites nearby where we exchange lots of mail. Things calmed down after a while. Then Brian Reid started complaining. He is the postmaster at a site that was relaying some of our mail on to the UUCP world. Several of the next layer of machines didn't know about quotes, and the rejections were landing in Brian's mailbox. I "solved" that one by translating all the spaces to underbars in the return-path in the envelope. I did that because I "knew" that none of our names contained any underbars so I could make the reverse translation without fear of breaking anything. Is the space/underbar substitution universal enough that I can do it to the whole header without fear of mangling some address that really should have a space in it? I haven't yet managed to convince myself that I won't provoke a really obscure problem if I just blindly "fix" all the quoted spaces to/from underbars. Have all the (flakey) Unix systems out there established a de-facto addendum to RFCs 821/822 that prohibits quoted strings? ----- Does/will the X400 world have spaces in names, or will there be spaces in names by the time they get mapped/translated into RFC 821/822 format?