As a card carrying member of "Team Open Source", I'll readily admit that modern email is by far the best (and maybe the only) example of "walled gardens" being a net benefit to the internet.
This blog post is another example of the quirks of SMTP and more importantly the benefits of reading the protocol specs.
P.S. Documenting the path you used to arrive at a bug fix is always beneficial should your future self have to explain that fix to another team that works on the same codebase (commit messages are not sufficient).
Thanks for reading and as always, all comments, critiques and questions are highly appreciated. Here's a link to the
previous article response.