Mailing List Archive

Re: Found the RFC rule for that "pseudo part" problem
> But ripMIME (as well being a MIME-aware tool) should
> *not* extract that, as it is not a valid message part
> (it's more like a graffity :) ), and then all would
> work well.

Ah, but ripMIME -should- extract it, because it is a part of what email clients do/will see. You see, ripMIME is more than just an 'extraction' tool, it's a tool which is used to break down emails as other email clients will see them. Lets take a hypothetical situation -

Lets say an email client, JoesMTA-2003 has an exploit which comes in via this 'blank space' zone where everyone puts "This is a MIME encoded email", instead of putting that, they use some form of fancy VB string to make Outlook do their bidding. Now, if ripMIME conformed 'strictly' to the standards then this exploit would not be able to be searched for because ripMIME wouldn't be extracting the file.

There are a few things in ripMIME which are extracted outside of the 'strict conformance' of the RFC's, ie:

- UUENCODED attachments within the main text body
- LF-LF delimeted MIME bodies
- and of course this 'blank space' zone data

Perhaps, a simple method of getting around this is to check the _headers_ file to see if there's a boundary specification contained within it (ie, grep "boundary=" _headers_ ) and if so, then start your textfile filtering from textfile1, else start from textfile2.

There are other possible solutions:

1. Single textfile output containing full catencation of all textfile outputs
2. output the 'blank space' zone text to a seperate file, ie, 'blankzone'

Ultimately, forcing ripMIME to -not- extract parts/aspects of a mailpack is against the focus of ripMIME.

I hope that this helps out a bit... let me know

Kind Regards.

--
Paul L Daniels http://www.pldaniels.com
Linux/Unix systems Internet Development
ICQ#103642862,AOL:cinflex,IRC:inflex
A.B.N. 19 500 721 806
Re: Re: Found the RFC rule for that "pseudo part" problem [ In reply to ]
> 2. output the 'blank space' zone text to a seperate file, ie,
'blankzone'

Yes, yes, this would be the correct behavior.

> Ultimately, forcing ripMIME to -not- extract parts/aspects of a mailpack is against the focus of ripMIME.

Agree totally, my last suggestion was actually a
bit off, as I also appreciate ripMIME digging every
bit out of the mail. The original point still holds,
so clients programs should be able to trivially
pick those parts that were put there by the person
who wrote the mail.

So, separating junk from real data would be very
much welcomed. (If possible, not only the dead zone
at the beginning and at the end (after the last boundary
separator), but all those 0-byte non-part files could
have a common filename prefix different from 'textfile'.

Then, a command-line option could be used to disable
saving those files. Quite good, ripMIME already has
--no-nameless, changing it slightly to handle this
so that *real* parts still get saved, even if have
no name, would be very nice.

Thanks so much, and keep up with this great stuff!
Sab