Subject: RE: Transparency
From: Paul Smith <[email-masked]>
To: "Tulsi Ram Mayala" <[email-masked]>, "Paul Smith" <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 13:08:01 +0100
List-Id: <ietf-smtp.imc.org>

At 20:43 16/05/2006, Tulsi Ram Mayala wrote:
>The question is not about the difficulty/ease of implementation. It is 
>about defining exact inverse operation and RFC should define it correctly.
>
>Yes a sender sending a single dot is buggy.

>But a receiver not removing a dot in case of a single dot should not be 
>called buggy.

Why? It simply doesn't do what RFC 2821 says it should do - ie, it's not 
SMTP compliant if it doesn't remove a leading dot.

>Maybe a better way to put it is it can throw an error ("Invalid data 
>input" or something else).

It probably could if it wanted to, but silently not removing the dot is a 
bug AFAICS.

I can't see any reason to consider a change to RFC 2821 here. It's pretty 
clear, not self-contradictory, and not a problem to implement.