There was one attempt to use (essentially, though as I recall, not quite
implemented that way) out of band data for mail collection files - that
is, adding a header and length field (much like tar format, or cpio, etc,
but much simpler) but which was a spectacular failure, and hated much more
than '>From' (which is mostly an annoyance, though it does screw integrity
checking).
I remember that; it was the Content-Length header, right? From my dim
memory, it was really only a Solaris thing. And whoo yeah, it was a
screaming failure. From my memory it wasn't that people liked to edit
maildrops so much; the real problem was that a lot of software didn't
know about it and treated it like an mbox file (because it looked like
one) but things fell over when it encountered a stray "From".
It occurs to me that since MH messages are simply files, you can use the
standard set of Unix tools such as "tar" to archive them, and that will
work no matter what the message contents are because the metadata really
is stored out of band.
--Ken
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