EMERGENCY: MyParty

Julian Field jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Mon Jan 28 20:20:25 GMT 2002


At 19:55 28/01/2002, you wrote:
>On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 06:18:57PM +0000, Julian Field wrote:
> > It's not a proper attachment, it's just uuencoded data stuffed in-line in
> > the main body of the (plain text) message. There are no MIME headers at
> > all, or anything. It's just in-line data, which apparently some email
> > clients appear to identify, decode, and present like an attachment.
>
>Which makes perfect sense.  I've been downloading uuencoded goodies for
>years from usenet, and posted a few myself (back in the pre-spam,
>pre-www days).  MIME wasn't around back then.
>
>It seems to me that it would make sense to pass the message body into
>"DefinitelyClean" and simply check for a uuencoded file, which would be
>a simple regex and would surely be quicker than scanning all files.  The
>logic would be:
>
>if mime header return 0;
>if uuencoded file in body return 0;
>return 1;
>
>That shouldn't require too much more horsepower.

Can we guarantee that this only works with uuencoded files, and doesn't
work with other encodings in some mail clients as well?
As the US Army say (apparently), "assumption is the mother of all
f***-ups". I've been bitten by this once now, I don't want to get bitten
again. So for the moment it stays as it is now.
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ



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