🚀 go-pugleaf

> From: Andy Sherman <andys@flatline.sbi.com>
> Subject: Re: MH and Solaris 2.x sendmail
> Date: 11 Jan 93 16:08:50 GMT

> No, it is not in the cards for me to mung /bin/mail.  Another poster
> pointed out that sendmail *does* have an option to quote From_ lines,
> which I may do, although I'd much rather teach MH to grok
> Content-Length headers (the ugly hack is building as we speak).  My
> reasoning is that Sun did *not* break UUCP-style maildrops, but rather
> they unbroke them in preparation for things like a) their multi-media
> mail, b) MIME, and c) X.400, all of which use content-length to give
> you a definitive answer to the question "Where does the $%$##@# body
> end, anyway?"

FYI, MIME does *NOT* use content-length, or anything like it.  The
content-length header is completely nonstandard.

The ">From" hack is ugly, no doubt about it.  However, using a header field
to delimit messages within a mailbox strikes me as even worse, particularly
when it breaks interoperability with other systems using NFS as a mail access
protocol.

However, it seems like MH wants to support the local mailbox format, whatever
that is...so it might do well for a future version of MH to be able to grok
Content-length headers on local mailboxes only on Solaris systems.  But I'd
just as soon they be REMOVED from all outgoing mail.  The presence of
Content-length headers in Internet email is just going to add to the general
confusion about what is standard and what isn't.

Keith Moore