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Re: Is ASCII 0 valid in a message body?



I found the cause of the problem:

Mail from auckland.ac.nz arrives with a lot of null characters at the
end of it (there were 38 of them the last time I checked one).  Zmailer
correctly delivers the messages by appending any subsequent messages to
the next line after the message with the null characters.  The joining of the
messages occurs when you read your mail, and the user agent rewrites the
mailbox to update it.  The null characters in the mailbox, although legal
(as Matti pointed out), are treated as end of string/file/etc by Unix/C and
cause these problems.  This happened for the Pine and MM user agents.
If ASCII 0 is legal, then user agents should be fixed to account for them,
even UNIX user agents, right?  I'll email the Pine developers and see what I
they have to say about this.  Thanks to everyone who responded.

Julio Polo
University of Hawaii
Information Technology Services

> This line is from an "inbox" mail file (wherever "mailbox" delivers mail)
> 
> fax:  55 5 5555555From coombs.anu.edu.au!owner-pacific-islands-l Sun Jul 23..
>                  ^^
> Note how the message from coombs.anu.edu.au starts on the same line as the
> end of the previous message.  I'm guessing a NUL character (ASCII 0) was
> at the end of the previous message, which in UNIX means end of input/file/etc.
> This often happens with mail coming from auckland.ac.nz and sent with Pegasus 
> Mail/Mac.  It causes most mail user agents (Pine, MM) to misparse the mail 
> file
> and display two messages as one, or sometimes skip all messages after that 
> altogether.