Re: [Nmh-workers] corruption when attaching all-null files

[Paul Fox]

ken wrote:
 > >in testing the marker line format, i created a bunch of files of
 > >varying sizes in order to attach them.  by chance, i used dd from
 > >/dev/zero to create the files, so they all consist of null characters.
 > >
 > >it turns out that when i attach such a file, something goes wrong, and
 > >i end up with the mime header for the attachment, but an empty part, and
 > >mhlist complains about "bogus multipart content"
 > 
 > So, we handle text that contain NULs generally pretty lousy ... but
 > AFAICT, a NUL is not valid in a RFC 5322 (or MIME) text part.  The
 > specifics of that are something I'm not sure about, through; it might be
 > valid in some circumstances.  AFAIK, if a NUL is in a non-text part, we
 > should (and as far as I know, we do) handle that properly, becuase that
 > gets encoded with base64.

it gets assigned a type of application/octet-stream, but no encoding
gets done.  after using Attach:, and then running mime on the draft,
it looks like this:  (copy/pasted from my edit buffer, where the nulls
show up as '^@')

----cut-here----
    To: pgf-mhparts
    Subject: yat
    From: Paul Fox <address@hidden>
    Cc:
    Fcc: outbox
    MIME-Version: 1.0
    Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0"
    Content-ID: <address@hidden>

    ------- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
    Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
    Content-ID: <address@hidden>

    ----------------------
     paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 63.1 degrees)

    ------- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
    Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="19900"
    Content-Description: 19900
    Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="19900"

    
address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden@address@hidden>

    ------- =_aaaaaaaaaa0--
----cut-here----


 > 
 > If you could give specifics on what went wrong that would be useful.

should be able to in a day or three.  if no one gets there first.

paul

 > 
 > --Ken
 > 
 > _______________________________________________
 > Nmh-workers mailing list
 > address@hidden
 > https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers

----------------------
 paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 64.0 degrees)