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formail -s needs bodies

1998-01-16 12:29:04
Just an observation from recent personal experience.

I had a file of alternating From: and Date: lines and wanted to convert it
into an mbox.

  formail -dem2 -s < input > mailbox

should have done it, right?  Nope; formail -s took it all as one message,
even with -m1.  When I edited in blank lines, the command worked.

My first reaction was that the -e option wasn't working as advertised and
that the blank lines were necessary after all.

Then I realized the real problem: there was no interruption in the succession
of valid header lines in the input for anything that could look like a body. 
I could have put something other than blank lines between each pair of
headerfields and then -e would have done its job, but as long as every
additional line looked like a valid RFC822 headerfield, even if its name was
the same as one that had appeared earlier, formail -s assumed that it was
still the same message's head.

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