Re: Gnus, movemail, POP3, trailing empty lines

[visigoth@naiad.fac.cs.cmu.edu]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no> writes:

> Yes; the change was made around 0.70, I think.  The new version is
> more correct than the last version, but it doesn't deal with these
> types of misconstructed spool files.  The "From " header is supposed
> to have a blank line before it, from what I understand.

Okay--here's a quote from the document I found which talks about mbox
format.  It's from the man pages that come with qmail (yes,
D.J. Bernstein is a flaming, uh, maniac, but I think this is
reasonable):

       A message encoded in mbox format begins with a From_ line,
       continues with a series of non-From_ lines, and ends  with
       a  blank  line.   {...}

HOW A MESSAGE IS READ
       
       A reader scans through an  mbox  file  looking  for  From_
       lines.   Any  From_ line marks the beginning of a message.
       The reader should not attempt to  take  advantage  of  the
       fact  that  every  From_  line  (past the beginning of the
       file) is preceded by a blank line.

{...}

It's my belief, that regardless of what any standard says, Gnus should
accept messages in this broken format.  Remember: the goal is to
accept as many formats as possible, even if they're broken, and to
produce only correct output.

>From ...
some stuff
>From this line is in the message, not a new one
some more stuff

should never be generated as an mbox file, unless Content-Length is
included in the file, because From lines are quoted with >.  This is
*not* ambiguous.  The above can only be generated by two sequential
messages.

The fact that we know of at least one place that the above can happen
for two messages and no places where it can occur for a single message
leads me to a rather obvious conclusion.

Sorry to rant, but I don't see why this is being argued about.

John.