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The curious case of the missing period

tjaart.substack.com

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Re: The curious case of the missing period

#81

Post by bruce343434 »

As someone who configures email servers for a living (among other things): email needs to be replaced, frankly. This is a stupid protocol with even stupider file formats. What is the reason for such a hard coded line limit? It's just a stream of bytes...

Not to mention all the weird bandaids on top of bandaids to try to get sender verification and tamper proof emails working. That alongside the complete lack of end to end encryption.

It's just an incredibly unpleasant tech stack from top to bottom, through and through. The amount of moving parts/pieces of running software needing to cooperate just right to even function as a simple outgoing-only mail server is too damn high.

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#83

Post by carimura »

Good story. Reading this reminds me of all the "curious cases of....." that I've solved (or in some cases not solved) over my career and how that feeling of triumph is so deeply tied to why I got into computers in the first place. The pure joy of unraveling the mysteries of engineering... like forgetting a semi-colon somewhere in a 50k LOC Perl backend.

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#84

Post by om8 »

evmar wrote: post #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 shoul…

Single responsibility principle in its finest.

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#85

Post by im3w1l »

vlovich123 wrote: post #70
robryk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To steelman the GP's POV: there are other parts of solutions to problems where similar levels of rigour are required and cannot be filled in by using a preexisting library (state machines for distributed business logic come to mind as an example). Eliminating the need for that here doesn't help that much in general, and might even make things worse, because it gives people less experience with tasks demanding rigour…

Learning to blindly follow a spec for the purposes of parsing the SMTP wire protocol doesn't give you extra ability to follow the state machine or distributed business logic specs better. It just adds to the overall opportunities for you to make a mistake. This also ignores the fact that SMTP specs is split across multiple RFCs with no single normative version which further complicates the probability that you implem…

> This also ignores the fact that SMTP specs is split across multiple RFCs with no single normative version which further complicates the probability that you implement the spec correctly in the first place.

This is a point I agree with and the fact I see it mentioned so rarely, that standards are split across multiple RFC's makes me suspect that people don't mention it because they don't know because they never read them in the first place, and rather try to follow the implementation of some existing program.

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#86

Post by davidmurdoch »

dankwizard wrote: post #74
davidmurdoch wrote: post #33

Loved reading this. This is now one of my new favorite bug hunt stories!

[flagged]

You disagree that I loved the article? Or that it's one of my new favorites?

(I'm only messing with you as you criticized the author's use of language then replied to me with imprecision.)

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#87

Post by the_real_tjaart »

carimura wrote: post #83

Good story. Reading this reminds me of all the "curious cases of....." that I've solved (or in some cases not solved) over my career and how that feeling of triumph is so deeply tied to why I got into computers in the first place. The pure joy of unraveling the mysteries of engineering... like forgetting a semi-colon somewhere in a 50k LOC Perl backend.

> how that feeling of triumph is so deeply tied to why I got into computers in the first place

I share your sentiment, thank you for reading.

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#88

Post by the_real_tjaart »

kazinator wrote: post #32

But 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.

This was just an example, sorry for not providing a real example that had the exact character count.
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