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Re: [nmh-workers] INCing of email archives

2019-07-26 09:47:22
Once in a while I download email archives of some mailing list
and unpack them using "inc -file <archive-file>". But more
than once I have seen that inc gets confused and doesn't
unpack the whole thing. The cause seems to be a line starting
with From in some message body. Ideally inc should look that
a "From ..." line is immediately followed by header lines.
And if this is not the case, assume it is in the message body.

I thought the trigger was "\n\nFrom: ", and that no more headers
were needed.

It seems that mbox format was officially standardized in RFC 4155
(although even that RFC acknowledges that there are lot of variations).
I guess the best you can count on is:

From <unspecified stuff here>

Note no colon (that's a header field).

To make it even more confusing, technically \n\n is NOT part of the
separator because at the beginning of the mbox file you don't have a
blank line.  Every other message in the mbox file IS supposed to have
a blank line followed by a "From ".

--Ken

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