Re: Why does Gnus generates Lines: header in mail?

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:

> For example, POP does not have a mechanism by which it can determine the
> size of messages.  But it can get all the headers.  A POP client can
> grab the headers of all messages, check the Lines headers for each, and
> skip any messages that exceed a user-defined threshold.  This is useful,
> for example, if you happen to be a travelling sales engineer currently
> somewhere in India using a cellular/gsm phone at 9600 baud to download
> your mail but don't want the 150MB PowerPoint presentations that your
> manager sent out to everyone, at least not until you get back to your
> office and a T1.  I am not making this up.  I have an SE who routinely
> does this.

Do enough mail clients generate accurate Lines headers to make this
worthwhile?

> On the Usenet side of things, Gnus Agent uses Lines headers the same way,
> to determine if a message qualifies as "long" and does not automatically
> retrieve articles that exceed the "long" threshold.

It shouldn't.  It should be using overview for that information.  A huge
percentage of Lines headers in Usenet articles are simply completely wrong
(such as only counting half of a multipart/alternative, or being
calculated prior to signature appending, or simply being completely
unrelated to reality).  This is why USEFOR is going to remove the header
completely for Usenet; for Usenet, it's worthless.

Overview is required to include a line count.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>