Gary had asked,
F> Also, does a mail message with only "From " line qualify as a valid mail
F> message?
I responded,
T> It does if there is an empty line before it, or if it is at the very
T> beginning of the input, or if you are using formail's -e option.
Stan corrected,
R> Um, no; although procmail/formail may be able to handle it somewhat,
R> it's not a valid *mail* message since those must have required
R> RFC822 headers.
True. I was considering "valid" for formail to split it out from an mbox
as a separate message and not the other requirements of email.
T> That's additional reason that I'm thinking it's procmail, not formail,
T> adding the default foo(_at_)bar postmark. When you run that recipe, procmail
T> hasn't added it yet, and the message is still empty.
R> I think I am confused as to what you are saying here...
R> procmail does not generate a foo(_at_)bar line for me when fed
R> an empty message:
| % cat junk.rc
| :0
| junkbox
| % procmail ./junk.rc < /dev/null
| % ls -l junkbox
| -rw------- 1 stanr 1 Dec 12 00:16 junkbox
| % od -c junkbox
| 0000000 \n
| 0000001
| %
Hmm.
| As you can see, the above produced just a newline. "foo(_at_)bar"
| only appears in the (3.11pre7) formail man page, and indeed
| formail does generate them:
|
| % formail < /dev/null
| >From foo(_at_)bar Sun Dec 12 00:18:19 1999
Formail does not add "From foo(_at_)bar timestamp" to a message with no postmark
(1) when you use formail's -f option nor (2) when you use -D and -s together
and the message is deemed a duplicate. And if formail had generated it, why
couldn't procmail match on it?
Now, the following is possible: somewhere in Gary's .procmailrc, *after*
the recipe that was supposed to trash all messages postmarked From foo(_at_)bar
but before the messages were filed, there was a filtering recipe that ran
the text through formail without -f. That would definitely add the foo(_at_)bar
postmark. Another thought I had was that procmail appended the empty
message, without using the `r' flag, to an existing mbox rather than to a new
file as you used in your test, Stan, so that's why it generated a postmark;
but I tested that and procmail did not generate a postmark.