Re: [Nmh-workers] masquerade settings & spost

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> I would love to be able to prevail upon them to fix this or to dump all
> such nonconforming mail in the bin. That said, when I get mail from
> ConfMaster, it tends to be mail that I need to read, so I appreciate it
> when nmh can take a guess and perhaps show me some not-too-garbled text.
> (In this particular case, 'show' just barfs, sadly.)

Can you define 'barf' in a bit more detail.  And could you forward one of those 
messages to me (offline) as an attachment?

> My suggestion, then, is this: Could we both have some indication that
> the input is bad, *and* have nmh make an attempt at interpreting it? I
> appreciate knowing when I have bad input; otherwise, I can't crusade
> for internet hygiene. But I also appreciate being able to read
> malformed, yet important messages.

Certainly show(1) should not crap out when presented with garbage.  But the 
best it can reasonable expect to do is terminate gracefully after printing an 
error message.

Any attempt to re-sync after a decoding error is a vector for security 
breaches.  If I can fool your MIME parser, I can create what, upon visual 
inspection looks like a legit message, but when shovelled into your favourite 
external processing script, inserts a faked out MIME part that sends grandma 
porn to the DHS.

The great thing about MH is that you can apply cat/less/vi to a malformed 
message and let your brain try to decipher what's going on, therefore there is 
no need to open yourself up to attack by trying to turn show into an AI engine.

--lyndon