[ticker-dev] metamail and attachments

[David Arnold]

after some experiementation this morning, it appears that there is a
bug in metamail-2.7, which is the current (since about 1993 or
something ridiculous) release of the program used on many Unix
platforms for interpreting MIME attachments.

metamail fails to detect the end of the RFC-2822 headers when they are
properly terminated with a CRLF+CRLF sequence (ie. a blank line).  a
LF+LF sequence *does* work, suggesting to me that it incorrectly reads
a CRLF as a non-empty line (containing a single CR).

since this package is both reasonably ubiquitous on Unix (although
gradually being replaced now by GNOME/KDE/etc) and unmaintained, an
upstream bugfix is unlikely to happen.


unix clients that use metamail to handle attachments should be aware
of this problem, and modify the attachment content appropriately
before spawning metamail.


fyi,




d