Mark wrote:
In the message dated: Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:19:59 BST,
The pithy ruminations from Peter Maydell on
<Re: [Nmh-workers] 128 byte field name limit in NAMESZ breaks scan(1)> were:
=> David Levine wrote:
=> >Mark wrote:
=> >> Messages with very long envelope "From" lines break scan(1). This
=> >> behavior happens with nmh 1.3 and 1.2.
=> >>
=> >> These messages are typically from mailing lists (Yahoo groups, in
=> >> particular ). The "Subject" field in the scan listing is displayed
=> >> as just an asterisk (*) .
=>
=> >I've noticed this, too. Glad that you tracked it down,
=> >thanks :-)
=>
=> I think this has been reported on the bug tracking system before.
=> (https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?14975)
Yes, that does sound like the issue I'm seeing. Note that the bug
was opened in 2005. I'm really not a "C" programmer, but it took me
almost as long to read the bug report as it did to increase the
value of NAMESZ. As far as I'm concerned, this is a trivial fix to a
signficant interface issue (ie., not being able to see the fields in
the scan listing).
=> What I want to know is why you have files in your ~/Mail/whatever/
=> with envelope 'From ' lines in the first place. The usual path
=> via inc doesn't have them (I think because they are the delimiters
I do the same thing that's described in the bug report...I use formail &
procmail & rcvstore. I haven't typed "inc" in years.
=> in a mail spool file and so get stripped out as the messages are
=> split). So perhaps this bug should be fixed by making whatever
=> path you're using to put messages in the folder strip out the
=> envelope From as inc does.
Ah, I had procmail configured to insert the 'From ' line,
with its -f option.
Maybe I don't understand bug #14975, but the 'From ' line that
procmail -f inserts does not start with '>'. It starts with 'From ',
and if it's longer than 127 bytes, scan complains.
Perhaps, as the bug report from 2005 stated, that would break mail
filtering that actually looks at the "From " line. Why strip it
out...it's data about the mail delivery process, and may have some
value to some other process (spam filtering? mail statistics? random
number generation?).
Personally, I think that the philosophical argument about whether
tools strip out the "From " line or not is really separate from the
fact that the the scan listing breaks because of an arbitrarily
small value in NAMESZ. The first issue is difficult to resolve (as
evidenced by the 3 year-old bug), while the second issue is trivial
to fix (though maybe not as "pure" as some would want)....but what
do I know? :)
I agree. Any objection to raising NAMESZ to 512?
David
Mark
=>
=> -- PMM
=>
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