Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:
|>It seems it has been simply be carried along from original Unix
|>mail storage, and never has been properly adjusted thereafter.
|>POSIX also standardized this loose format which was in use since
|>that beginning. RFC 4155 defined a more proper format.
|
|I think there are two things that are being conflated here: the
|various "standards" of the mbox format, and nmh's use of it.
|
|Since nmh doesn't use mbox as a mail store, things like RFC 4155 aren't
|really relevant; we don't deal with mbox files except for two specific
|tools. So our goal here is to deal with existing mail DROPS (I use
|that term to specify a place where external tools store mail where nmh
|can read it).
Well, using RFC 4155 parse rules for From_ lines can lead to
different message boundary detection.
|Of course, the more I dig into it the more fun I find. For example:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
|
|Which suggests that SOME mbox formats do perform reversible
|From-munging. Urrrk.
I removed that from the MUA i maintain, because you never know for
sure: for that you would need to scan the entire message first,
check if several From_ lines occur and have been quoted alike,
before you start to remove what you think is a superficial From_
quote. And then ezml i think it was (what unicode.org had before
the switch to i think mailman) simply placed a space in the first
column... Any non truly-reversible change changes the original
content, applying a MIME content-encoding is standardized, there
you go.
|This suggests to me that a "next-gen" maildrop parser should be prepared
|to handle what Wikipedia calls "mboxo" and "mboxrd" format. A web page
|linked to on that page suggests that on Linux Content-Length variants
|(mboxcl and mboxcl2) are more common on Linux, but I am skeptical that
|is true.
mutt actively manages these header lines, at least.
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
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