POP3 and trailing newlines

POP3 and trailing newlines

[Kai Grossjohann]

Hi all,

maybe you remember that I posted about Michael having problems with
his Gnus and POP3 and movemail.

What happened was that mails that didn't end with a trailing newline
had the succeeding message appended.

Now we know why it happened, and I've got to say it's all Michael's
fault.  Here's the story.  For some reason Michael didn't like
movemail to produce Babyl format when reading from POP3.  Therefore he
changed it to use mbox format in those cases, too.  And guess what, he
didn't append an empty line to each message.  Now he's changed
movemail to append empty lines to each message, and he's a happy
camper now.

I would still like to see some reference that tells me about the mbox
format.  There was a posting of somebody quoting part of the qmail
documentation, but somehow I think that the mbox format must be much
older than qmail and therefore be described somewhere else.  Just to
be *totally* sure that mbox format requires trailing newlines for each
mail ;-)

kai
-- 
The arms should be held in a natural and unaffected way and never
be conspicuous. -- Revised Technique of Latin American Dancing

Re: POP3 and trailing newlines

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> writes:
> I would still like to see some reference that tells me about the mbox
> format.  There was a posting of somebody quoting part of the qmail
> documentation, but somehow I think that the mbox format must be much
> older than qmail and therefore be described somewhere else.

"Use the source, Luke."

Not that the indicated source file is especially handy any more.

I don't know if it has ever been documented /ex post facto/, but mbox
format derives from V6 UNIX' mail.c, circa 1976.  No joke.  Back when
/bin/mail was considered a user interface, the only cross-machine
transport was UUCP (not even an integral part -- as an add-on beyond
standard UNIX as distributed by Western Electric), "mail headers" were
nothing but repeated From_ lines prepended to the message at each UUCP
hop with "remote from <othermachine>" at the end, and ARPANET was
barely a dream even to most researchers.

I have doubts that a formalized documentation of mail.c's habits has
ever existed.  You just have to /know/ what to do with an mbox file.

Re: POP3 and trailing newlines

[Kai Grossjohann]

>>>>> Karl Kleinpaste writes:

  Karl> I don't know if it has ever been documented /ex post facto/,
  Karl> but mbox format derives from V6 UNIX' mail.c, circa 1976.
  Karl> [...]

Yay!  What a coincidence!  Yesterday I called a bookstore to order:

Lions' Commentary on Unix 6th Edition (with source code),
by John Lions

Lucky me :-)

kai
-- 
The arms should be held in a natural and unaffected way and never
be conspicuous. -- Revised Technique of Latin American Dancing