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Re: odd behavior in enforcing of message size limits



Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi> writes:
>         Pardon me, but how does the PIPELINING step in with CHUNKING ?

Unlike DATA, BDAT is designed so that you can pipeline the contents of
the message when PIPELINING is also supported.  You save a round trip.

>         Now instead of waiting the half-duplex handshake at each line,
>         the SMTP-client waits for all of the reports after it has sent
>         the "DATA" command, and has flushed possible stdio buffers to
>         the connection  (thats how I do it at ZMailer SMTP-client).

To use PIPELINING on the client, you have to make sure you don't
deadlock--see paragraph 6 of section 2.1 of RFC 1854.  Generally, I
think it's easier to use select() and nonblocking mode.

>         Now if we add this BDAT mode ( = chunking ? )
>         .... mumble mumble (reading the RFC) ... Oh, I see:
>         "When streaming, the receiver SMTP must accept, and discard
>          additional BDAT chunks after the failed BDAT".. (until the
>          "BDAT nn LAST", I suppose..)

It's probably easiest to always parse the nn and discard the data
whenever you're not in a state where you can actually process the
data, as opposed to only doing this until you get a BDAT nn LAST.

>         I don't see actual use for this, EXCEPT with BINARYMIME, but
>         implementing a receiver for it should be rather trivial anyway..

BDAT is an optimization which can be useful even when you're not
transferring BINARYMIME.  You don't have to deal with dot-stuffing and
you don't have to spend a round trip waiting for the 354 reply to the
DATA command.  It's a really big win if you queue your messages in
canonical (CRLF-separated) form.  I don't know how much a win it would
be otherwise.

>         Will you test it, John ?

I'm not doing much SMTP development myself; I concentrate on IMAP
(which does have similar issues).  If you contact Ned Freed,
ned@innosoft.com, he should be able to point you at an implementation
of CHUNKING that you can test against.

>         And by the way:  utu.fi mailhost has not talked with any
>         system implementing CHUNKING keyword at EHLO responce during
>         the last 10 (or so) days.

CHUNKING is rather new.

-- 
_.John G. Myers		Internet: jgm+@CMU.EDU
			LoseNet:  ...!seismo!ihnp4!wiscvm.wisc.edu!give!up