I managed to work out the bug in my previous post. Turns out that it’s a bug in my software and a bug in whatever is handling the e-mail redirect at LunarPages. My bug: I was sending the ‘Host:’ HTML header twice. LunarPages? They were grabbing the list of host values, and concatenating them in order to produce the redirect location. So what was happening was in my host header I was writing

Host:www.chaosinmotion.com
Host: www.chaosinmotion.com:80

and apparently they were grabbing the value–presumably as part of some sort of JSP processing system, which I guess was returning the value

"www.chaosinmotion.com:80, www.chaosinmotion.com"

and they were just slapping a resource identifier at the end (“/forwardaddress”) and an “http://” on the front and sending it out.

I assert it’s a bug in their software because the RFC says that the Host: field of an HTTP request can be a host name optionally followed by a colon and a port number. Their software is broken because when they attempt to redirect people to their on-line e-mail reader application (which is on port 2095), if you set the Host string to

Host: www.chaosinmotion.com:80

you get redirected to http://www.chaosinmotion.com:80:2095…

There are some other issues I’m ironing out. But it appears my proxy redirector is working on about 95% of the web sites I’ve tried it with. Of course it’s failing on the one web site I want–the on-line e-mail application I want to connect to from work–but at least I’m making progress.