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GNATS' handling of long mail subject lines
From: |
Yngve Svendsen |
Subject: |
GNATS' handling of long mail subject lines |
Date: |
Tue, 03 Apr 2001 19:11:17 +0200 |
The MIME script I submitted has one very positive side-effect: It works
around GNATS' inability to handle long mail subject headers that are split
over several lines.
The problem is as follows: The RFCs describing e-mail and e-mail headers
(822 and 2047) allow for the possibility of splitting long headers across
several lines. The splitting is done by adding CRLF and then a space on the
next line, before the header itself continues.
A long "Subject:" header might thus look like this:
Subject: This is a PR with an extremely long subject line.
It keeps going on and on and on and on and on and on and
on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and
on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on all
the way until it stops
The MIME script I wrote removes the extra CRLF and space, placing the
entire header text on a single line. GNATS seems perfectly happy with that.
If this kind of header is fed directly into GNATS, as in a standard
plain-vanilla installation, all kinds of strangeness results. For instance,
the index is messed up, so that queries return garbage. See
http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl?cmd=view&pr=161&database=gnats
for more details.
The upshot of this is that mail parsing in GNATS itself needs to be
improved. This shouldn't be too much of a challenge for someone with a bit
of experience with C (I am, unfortunately NOT one of those). It should be
done independently of implementation of MIME handling and other
internationalization.
Anyone feel up to the challenge? I may be able to provide a little bit of
further help if someone wants to take it on. In the meantime, the MIME
script provides a temporary workaround.
Yngve Svendsen
IS Engineer
Clustra AS, Trondheim, Norway
address@hidden
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