Re: Your basic blank msg...retry...

"Jeff G." <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> >
> Tnx, Blamo, but that isn't the problem.  I just didn't know that one
> could add to the body, altho it would seem that this site could deal
> with such moronic spam - its been around for at least a year or so...

Seems very odd having to explain things to a long-time user and
Forum Moderator, but will go along that the posting ID is just a
coincidence .... spam constructs have always been an issue.  Your
amazement that the parser can't handle such a 'simple' issue is
actually by design.  You have to look at things from the other side.

Spammers play games.  There is more than one e-mail server
application out there.  There is more than one e-mail client
application in use 'out there' ... User knowledge and experience
ranges from ancient guru to 'just bought my first computer an
hour ago" .... Let's pick a nice round number of 100 spam
submittals a second coming in.

Somehow, the parsing engine must decide;

header complete, RFC compliant, actually valid content?
is there a blank line to separate the header and body?
is there a body?  if so, plain text, HTML, Base-64, .ZIP file, ..???
are there any attachments?  if so, encoding, file type, etc.????
oh wait, is this a user submittal with a dozen spams attached?
maybe now, the parser might pass it on to the look-up tools ..??

Problems in the above?  Was it due to ...
spammer construct,
e-mail server configuration issue
e-mail transmission issue
e-mail client issue
user hosed something up in a cut/paste/add as attachment/Forward
lightening strike in Timbuktu tossed some trash on the line somewhere

I'm not even going to go near the actual "let's process
the sucker" part of the marvel ...  even the above doesn't
try to touch everything .. just trying to suggest that if
there is any "surprise" it probably ought to be that it
works as well as it does ...