Re: bad (i.e. serious) mail problems

[Hans de Graaff <graaff@xs4all.nl>]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:

> * Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE  on Thu, 01 Apr 1999
> | What pop3-movemail does amounts to interpreting From_ as the end of
> | the message (the beginning of a new one, actually, but you know what I
> | mean).
> 
> This is nonsense, as you would see if you looked at the source code.  pop3
> sees a message as a message, exactly as the server presents it.  pop3
> generates a delimiter at the *beginning* of the message it is currently
> dealing with only when no delimiter exists.

I agree, and this also makes sense. What I perceive as the issue that
people are discussing is that you should in this case also make sure
that there are no other From_ lines in the message you are writing
out, because those will be interpreted by any mbox-reading application 
as additional, if erroneous, message delimiters. 

For example (and I know I'm not getting all the details and formats of 
the headers right, but that doesn't matter for the argument):

Message 1 is received from POP:

----
From: someone
Subject: none

This is a message that has a line that starts with
>From .
And an extra line to boot.
----

The message contains no From_ line at the start, so you add one, and
write the complete message to the mbox. Then message 2 comes in.

----
>From someone at some date
From: xyzzy
Subject: all

Another message
----

This message does contain a From_ line, so you just write the full
message to the mbox file. Let's now look at the mbox file:

----
*From* someone at some date
From: someone
Subject: none

This is a message that has a line that starts with
*From* .
And an extra line to boot.
*From* someone at some date
From: xyzzy
Subject: all

Another message
----

Instead of having two message delimiters of the form From_, there are
three. This happens because the From_ line in the body of the first
message is not escaped when it is written into an mbox style folder.

> Now, if you want to argue the choce of an mbox-style delimiter being a bad
> one, I would agree -- mbox is lousy.

:-) I don't think anybody would want to argue about /that/.

Hans