[ih] The Postel Principle

• Subject: [ih] The Postel Principle
• From: johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)
• Date: 9 Nov 2019 21:00:01 -0500
• In-reply-to: <[email protected]>

In article <4098a024-0898-afbe-648e-76dbcec928b9 at 3kitty.org> you write:
>"The robustness principle, often phrased as "be conservative in what you
>send, and liberal in what you accept", has long guided the design and
>implementation of Internet protocols. ...

I always understood it to mean being liberal where the spec was
ambiguous, not to program around other people's bugs when they didn't
read the spec.

For those of us in the e-mail world, SMTP implementations tend to be
very strict because we have observed that badly written spamware has
protocol bugs and real mail software doesn't.  There's a bunch of
highly accurate anti-spam techniques that look for protocol errors.

R's,
John

• References:
  • [ih] The Postel Principle
    • From: internet-history at elists.isoc.org (Jack Haverty via Internet-history)

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