Re: Mail without `From:' lines

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

>>>>> "SJ" == Sudish Joseph <sudish@VNET.IBM.COM> writes:

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

Pine wasn't dealing with random junk and it wasn't doing any
transformations, and it went against an established tradition for how
to use a particular header.  None of these are relevant for the issue
at hand, quite the contrary Gnus would be following an established
tradition, which mailers like VM has shown works well in practice.

It seems to me that converting the 'From ' line in the absence of a
`From:' header will be the right thing in all real examples, and no
worse than not converting it in hypothetical examples.

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

The `From ' line is an artifact of the mbox format, so leaving it
alone is not an option with other backends.  Converting is to an `X-'
header will break if the message is later read by another mail agent
(like VM), who will then not be able to access the information.  The
only way to preserve the information is to convert the broken message
into standard (RFC 822) format.