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Re: pruning mbox's based on number of messages?

1999-12-12 12:09:48
On 12 December 1999, era eriksson <era(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi> wrote:
On Sat, 11 Dec 1999 11:46:03 -0800, gary(_at_)Intrepid(_dot_)Com (Gary Funck)
wrote:
 > "messages" is a shell script, which ultimately does the following:
 >
 >     mcount=`egrep -c "^From " $fname`
 >
 > which uses grep on '^From ' to get the message count. I think this
 > isn't exactly right from a MIME-compliance point of view. Maybe
 > someone will help to clarify this point.

MIME doesn't really say anything about multiple messages in a folder.
As long as you're using Berkeley mbox folders, any line which starts
with the letters "From " is a mailbox separator.

    There's always our beloved "message/rfc822".  Since RFC 2046 didn't
bother to state whether "From_" lines are legal or not at the beginning
of "message/rfc822" attachments, different mailers ended up doing
different things: some of them (f.i. older versions of Netscape) will
keep "From_" lines, while others (such as newer Netscapes) will delete
them.  In a correctly formed attachment, such a line will be preceded by
an empty one.  And since it obviously also has a valid "From_" syntax,
you can't rely on parsing its content either.  Like it or not, in such
cases "Content-Length:" is your only hint (if you insist on using mbox
mailboxes that is).

[...]
FWIW, many Quoted-Printable encoders will change any leading From to
=46rom
[...]

    IIRC, RFC 2015 requires signed PGP/MIME messages to do this.

    Regards,

    Liviu Daia

-- 
Dr. Liviu Daia               e-mail:   Liviu(_dot_)Daia(_at_)imar(_dot_)ro
Institute of Mathematics     web page: http://www.imar.ro/~daia
of the Romanian Academy      PGP key:  http://www.imar.ro/~daia/daia.asc