procmail support [LWN.net]

procmail support

Posted Nov 26, 2010 10:00 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: procmail support by brianomahoney
Parent article: Reports of procmail's death are not terribly exaggerated

Ed Blackman noted that procmail cannot correctly handle MIME headers adhering to RFC 2047 (which include non-ASCII text), despite the fact that RFC 2047 dates back to 1996. RFC 2047-formatted headers are far from mandatory, but they do continue to rise in frequency.

Looks like there's something wrong with procmail.

(Log in to post comments)

procmail support

Posted Dec 2, 2010 12:28 UTC (Thu) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

To be fair, rfc2047-style headers are fully backward compatible. My procmail installations work through a lot of mail including theses header extensions without any problems.

Special handling is only needed if you want to modify and/or extract the mail headers via a natural format. E.g. the result of
$ formail -I "Subject: i am naïve"
will not be compliant with rfc2047, and
$ formail -x Subject
will *not* undo any encoding and just return the raw header content. Not a big deal, I think.