On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 11:02:57PM +0100, Rob wrote:
1) Your ISP doesn't use the legacy mailbox format and as such doesn't
generate the "From " header.
2) Fetchmail passes on exactly what it gets, which means no "From "
header.
Actually, it's stronger than that (in the ISP's favour). RFC(2)822 does not
permit or define a "From " mailbox separator. Any POP3 server which includes
it is in violation of RFC1939:
All messages transmitted during a POP3 session are assumed to conform
to the standard for the format of Internet text messages [RFC822].
Therefore if you receive an E-mail message via POP3, and wish to append it
to a Unix mbox file, then it is your own responsibility to add the
separator. If you're appending to the file using 'cat' (which is a dangerous
thing to do, considering all the issues of mailbox locking) you can easily
echo a From line as well.
The 'cat' script in this case is the local delivery agent, and it is the
*only* thing which knows that you are writing to an mbox file. Neither the
ISP's POP3 server, nor fetchmail, knows that you are intending to do this.
Even fetchmail running under Unix cannot deduce it; there are many different
formats for storing E-mail which either use a different separator, or no
separator at all, so it would be wrong for fetchmail to add it before
passing the message to your LDA.
Regards,
Brian.