From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <2bd61f9131e4884e8d6be2d62050bcf2@cat-v.org>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: acme mail
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:43:18 +0100
From: uriel@cat-v.org
In-Reply-To: <9e3065a5e5e787ac6be58466225cc0a7@swtch.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0323675c-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

This has been discussed before, but why not just drop the BSD mbox
format and use maildir or a similar format?  it will make this and
many other problems go away or at the very least much easier to deal
with.

Using venti directly for mail storage also sounds like it might be an
interesting option.

But IMHO the maildir-style storage is the best idea for now.

uriel


> I looked into this.  Whenever mail is delivered on Plan 9,
> any embedded From lines are quoted with an extra leading
> space.
> 
> The upas/fs raw and rawunix files show the raw disk format
> (the rawunix one includes a leading From line), which 
> includes the quoting.  Arguably the raw file should not quote
> embedded From lines, but rawunix definitely should.  
> 
> The formatted body file should remove the leading space but
> it does not.  No one has ever cared enough.
> 
> Acme mail just copies the unixheader and raw files into the
> new mailbox.  It should be using rawunix, but I'm sure rawunix
> came after the acme mail code.
> 
> All this applies to Plan 9 mail delivery.  The imap4 and pop3
> pieces of upas/fs do not quote From lines in downloaded 
> message bodies, and that inconsistency is the problem in
> this case.  The fix is to make pop3 and imap4 quote From lines
> in their message bodies (pretty easy in both cases) just like
> upas/fs will find in regular Plan 9 mail boxes.
> 
> Separately, one might be motivated to try to unquote From
> lines in the raw and body files. 
> 
> Russ