Monday, 01 April, 2002

Fighting with SMTP

I've been fighting with email again, trying to construct a message that contains hyperlinks that don't get broken by Mail Transfer Agents.  The project started because I needed to solve a problem for work, but I'm starting to take it personal.  It's an interesting exercise in frustration digging through dozens of Internet RFCs and trying many different approaches.  Just when I think I have it working, I get a message from one of my testers telling me that Mail Mangler 43.6 decided to truncate a URL, or that the URL doesn't appear active in Envelope version 5.  I've decided to really dig into the guts of Internet mail in order to figure out why it's so dang hard, and whether we can fix it.  I'm tempted to just can the whole mess and start over, but perhaps there's a way to salvage some of the knowledge we've gained over the years.