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List:       qmail
Subject:    Re: i-love-you-letter - Claus Farber.
From:       Russ Allbery <rra () stanford ! edu>
Date:       2000-05-30 21:35:36
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dsr <dsr@bbn.com> writes:

> Claus has been attaching a signature to his messages which looks like an
> attachment to a borken mail reader, but not to any compliant mail
> reader.

This isn't an entirely fair characterization, in my opinion.  He's adding
a signature which looks roughly like a uuencoded section, although would
fail a detailed regex check.  Many people, myself included, are using mail
readers that have an *option* to scan the body for uuencoded segments and
"convert" them on display to attachments, treating them the same as MIME
attachments, for convenience in dealing with legacy encoded messages.

Claus's signature also fools Gnus to the degree of showing up as an
attachment.  I think this is harmless; I just ignore it.  Sure, it could
use a more detailed check (like making sure each line except the second to
the last starts with M), but that would also make it slower, and I really
don't mind the false positives.  (And I do mind having the body scanning
be slower.)

In other words, it's possible for Claus's signature to show up as an
attachment in a non-borken mail reader; it's just not a big deal.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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