The curious case of the missing period
tjaart.substack.com
The curious case of the missing period
1–10 of 201 posts
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#2You can avoid this mess altogether by using the quoted-printable content encoding when generating emails.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#3So... SMTP client misses basic SMTP functionality that fits in the 20 lines summary.
Good luck having it handle any of the SMTP craziness that isn't on the short introduction to the protocol.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#4Dot stuffing required
SMTP https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-4.5.2
Also in POP3 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1939#page-8
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#5> A portion of this code implemented a SMTP client.
If I wanted to root cause this, the real problem is right there. Implementing protocols correctly is hard and bugs like in the post are common. A properly implemented SMTP client library, like one you would pull off the shelf, would accept text and encode it properly per the SMTP protocol, regardless of where the periods were in the input. The templating layer shouldn't be worrying about SMTP.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#6So... SMTP client misses basic SMTP functionality that fits in the 20 lines summary. Good luck having it handle any of the SMTP craziness that isn't on the short introduction to the protocol.
When you roll your own library duplicating something that likely already exists, you own it all. And that doesn't include all of the vendor-specific nonconforming edge-cases.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#7> A portion of this code implemented a SMTP client. If I wanted to root cause this, the real problem is right there. Implementing protocols correctly is hard and bugs like in the post are common. A properly implemented SMTP client library, like one you would pull off the shelf, would accept text and encode it properly per the SMTP protocol, regardless of where the periods were in the input. The templating layer shoul…
> Implementing protocols correctly is hard
That's why it's a best practice to specify protocols at a very high level (e.g. using cap'n'proto) instead of expecting every random sleep-deprived SDE2 to correctly implement a network exchange in terms of read() and write().
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#8> This meant some customers received emails informing them their new premium was now $2700 instead of $27.00.
there's a secondary issue here, why in the world would you auto split a monetary value across a numeric decimal indicator? why would you split lines at all for this use case?
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#9> A portion of this code implemented a SMTP client. If I wanted to root cause this, the real problem is right there. Implementing protocols correctly is hard and bugs like in the post are common. A properly implemented SMTP client library, like one you would pull off the shelf, would accept text and encode it properly per the SMTP protocol, regardless of where the periods were in the input. The templating layer shoul…
I agree 100%.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#10> This meant some customers received emails informing them their new premium was now $2700 instead of $27.00. there's a secondary issue here, why in the world would you auto split a monetary value across a numeric decimal indicator? why would you split lines at all for this use case?
From the article:
> The maximum total length of a text line including the is 1000