Message contains NUL characters ...

[John Fawcett]

Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Tuesday, May 10, 2005 at 22:33:43 (+0200), John Fawcett wrote: ]
> 
>>Subject: Re: Message contains NUL characters ...
>>
>>by the way, while looking into the code to do the patch, I saw that
>>cyrus already carries out some modifications to messages (example
>>removing bare \r and replacing bare \n with \r\n) so there is a
>>precedent.
> 
> 
> Note that EOL cleanups are a somewhat different issue -- if I'm not
> mistaken some encapsulation methods are already able to deal with EOL
> changes since this is a very common issue.  In any case one can conceive
> of arguments which show that these kinds of EOL cleanups are not
> destructive modifications of the message content (since EOL
> modifications may be necessary to even view the message on the
> recipient's system).
> 
> However finding a NUL embedded anywhere in the data is usually an
> indication of either a serious bug on the sending side, or at least an
> attempt to send opaque binary content of some type (which should have
> been encoded somewhow and thus also indicates either a serious bug on
> the sending side; or else it indicates malicious intent on the sending
> side).
> 
nothing actually breaks by removing the nuls. The messges weren't
readable before and may not be readable afterwards.
John
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