Re: bad (i.e. serious) mail problems - solution, kind of

[Dmitry Yaitskov <dimas@home.com>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE wrote:

> Dmitry Yaitskov <dimas@home.com> writes:
> 
>   > One of the messages had that magical sequence (perfectly legal in a
>   > mail message I think) - "\n\nFrom".
> 
> While "\n\nFrom " (note the space) may appear in a mail message, some
> programs use the Unix mbox format, which says that "From " at the
> beginning of a line is the start of a message, and a message ends in
> an empty line ("\n\n") -- so it is natural that "\n\nFrom " was
> interpreted as the end of one and the beginning of the next message.
> 
> The movemail program outputs babyl format when reading from a POP3
> server -- maybe you hacked your movemail or you are using the wrong
> movemail or you are not using movemail at all?

Thanks Kai & Jaap-Henk. Sorry, my ignorance - I did not know about the
special meaning of ^From in mbox format. Still, the problem was real,
and if I understand the situation correctly, it was in pop3-movemail
from pop3.el which I am using as my movemail. I have 2 versions of
pop3.el - 1.3q that comes with pgnus, and 2.03 from the XEmacs'
mail-lib package. Both screw things up. Below is my attempt to fix it,
the patch is against 1.3q. It does "work for me" (tm), but I am not
too sure I put the fix in the right place.


-------------------cut here--------------------
--- pop3.el.old	Wed Mar 03 20:38:16 1999
+++ pop3.el	Mon Mar 29 12:16:53 1999
@@ -200,6 +200,13 @@
 (defun pop3-clean-region (start end)
   (setq end (set-marker (make-marker) end))
   (save-excursion
	;; unix mbox format treats "^From " as message start. Escape it.
+    (goto-char start)
+	(if (re-search-forward "^From " end t)
+		(progn
+		  (goto-char (match-beginning 0))
+		  (insert ">")))
+	;;
     (goto-char start)
     (while (and (< (point) end) (search-forward "\r\n" end t))
       (replace-match "\n" t t))
-------------------cut here--------------------

-- 
Cheers,
-Dima.