For a second I thought this was the health forum
Mmm. The story is about a missing full stop.
The curious case of the missing period
41–50 of 201 posts
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#42I guessed the cause of the problem (well, "leading period") from the description, but that's because I've experienced a lot of pain in my life...
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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().
That why you have to read the specs of the protocol you want to implement. Its a matter of engineering rigorousness. Brute-forcing until "it works" doesn't cut it.
Reading is for nerds. Real programmers™ write. And they write code, for the machine, not docs or specs or any other silly stuff intended for interhuman communication.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#44Why would a cron job that sends e-mails need to implement its own SMTP client??? You just use the mail program from mailutils or whatever. Just from a point of view of deliverability, developing bare bones SMTP interaction over a socket is a nonstarter. You can't just connect to random mail exchange hosts directly and send mail these days. A solution has to be capable of connecting to a specific SMTP forwarding host…
Just another example of Zawinski's law, no?
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#45I see two huge bad habits here. The first is the obvious one, as pointed out by many commenters here: Don’t implement standards haphazardly, if you even should do so yourself. Either give the implementations the necessary care and attention, or use a pre-made library. But the other thing is: Don’t vendor your dependencies. Those libraries you use need to be updated regularly and timely, and absolutely not “only as ne…
> Don’t implement standards haphazardly, if you even should do so yourself. Either give the implementations the necessary care and attention, or use a pre-made library. I agree 100%.
Famous last words at >50% of the companies I've worked: "Just implement as much of standard X as you need to ship an MVP of feature Y!"
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#46Holy shit. This is one of the 2 bugs in my career I never solved. (That I knew about, and lost sleep over, etc…)
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#47The need for dot-stuffing is a side-effect of email's use of the period as part of the termination sequence CR LF . CR LF.
Mishandling of that sequence has led to other recently discussed bugs. https://smtpsmuggling.com/
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#48But the line "We are happy to welcome you to our family." is not anywhere near the line limit. There is something else going on here, like perhaps the whole thing actually being an HTML MIME attachment, perhaps? IN which it is like ... lots of text ... We are happy to welcome you to our family. or whatever. But if you blindly split HTML into lines, it will break tags.
and probably the vast majority of the people receiving those broken HTML emails will realize there's something wrong with the email's formatting, chalk up the problem to a company that can't be bothered to correctly write a legible email and lower the company's competence rating, and go on to the next email.
the company is just blindly unaware to their minor problem.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't require , but comfortably allows you to do.
Agreed. But this is SMTP, I have no doubt there are gateways out there that will reencode the mail and put the dot back in the wrong place, eg in the name of wrapping all URLs behind a phishing-warning-page
I think the point here is that any subsequent implementation handling the message may well not be susceptible to the problem thus avoiding the erroneous behavior.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#50But the line "We are happy to welcome you to our family." is not anywhere near the line limit. There is something else going on here, like perhaps the whole thing actually being an HTML MIME attachment, perhaps? IN which it is like ... lots of text ... We are happy to welcome you to our family. or whatever. But if you blindly split HTML into lines, it will break tags.
and probably the vast majority of the people receiving those broken HTML emails will realize there's something wrong with the email's formatting, chalk up the problem to a company that can't be bothered to correctly write a legible email and lower the company's competence rating, and go on to the next email. the company is just blindly unaware to their minor problem.
rarely do I hold the sins of an incompetent marketing department against the company itself. otherwise, there'd be no company left deemed as competent because all marketing departments are incompetent.