Re: Mail without `From:' lines

["Sudish Joseph" <sudish@VNET.IBM.COM>]

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:
> RFC 822 is irrelevant since a message without a "From: " is not an RFC
> 822 message in the first place.

Hardly.  Not when your goal is to generate an 822 format message.  The
issue isn't what format the original crud is in, the issue is what
format it will be transformed into.

> The question is how to transform a piece of random junk in unix mbox
> format into something resembling an RFC 822 message.  Using the

Just like it's Pine's intent to transform a random piece of junk into
a format that's suitable for following up to as a USENET message.  We
all know how that went, never mind that Pine's usage of Newsgroup
makes more sense in theory.

> information in the `From ' message separator to generate a missing
> `From:' and `Date:' header has worked fine for me when converting old
> mbox.out files, and works fine for VM and many other mail agents.

Hitting "r" on such a message is going to cause problems for anything
other than personal mail (yes, that's 822 behaviour, but then your
stated goal is to transform to 822 format).

I have yet to see an MDA-generated UNIX From_ line contain anything
other than the envelope sender (+ctime date), I'd be grateful if you
showed me such an example.

To put it simply:
Anything that can be achieved by munging together a From: header by
inspecting From_ can be done by inspecting From_ whenever you do not
see a From:.  If that doesn't please you, put the information in an
X-Bogosity: header.  Don't mess up a message that might later be
processed by an agent other than GNUS.

-Sudish