Re: Malformed header - what would you do?

In <[email protected]> Frank Ellermann <[email protected]> writes:

>Bruce Lilly wrote:

>> extension/user-defined (unlike 822, 2822 does not officially
>> distinguish the two distinct types) fields must conform to
>> the unstructured field restrictions on syntax, and that would
>> include the restriction on whitespace-only header lines.

>Where do you see this in 2822 ?  I found... 

>| unstructured    =       *([FWS] utext) [FWS]

I think Frank has a point here. In Section 3.2.3 of RFC 2822, it says:

   There are several places in this standard where comments and FWS may
   be freely inserted.  To accommodate that syntax, an additional token
   for "CFWS" is defined for places where comments and/or FWS can occur.
   However, where CFWS occurs in this standard, it MUST NOT be inserted
   in such a way that any line of a folded header field is made up
   entirely of WSP characters and nothing else.

But the prohibition against having WSP-only header lines only seems to
apply "where CFWS occurs in this standard", and not "where FWS occurs".

So it seems that you are allowed to have an empty (WSP-only) line in the
middle of a Subject header field.

That seems like a bug in RFC 2822 to me.

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