🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1350@minya.UUCP> jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
>In article <1992Aug26.203046.25591@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, sdm7g@aemsun.med.Virginia.EDU (Steven D. Majewski) writes:
>> What is the format of a unix mailbox file and where can the 

>had a very simple format back in the old days. A mail file was started
>either by the start of the file or by the sequence:
>   "\n\nFrom "

The ones I see only have one \n. The last mail message ends on the line
before the ^From.

>> How is the status of new, read, etc. indicated in the file? 
>
>What does that mean?  You are clearly talking about some mailer  other
>than the usual ones that come with Unix.  The basic Unix mailers don't
>add anything but a "From " line to the start of  a  message.   

No, he is thinking about the usual mail user agent. The MTA generally
adds only the Received-From headers: the From header is already in the
mail. The MUA manages the status of the messages by adding the Status:
line, which contains things like O for old and R for read. "Pine" uses
the X-Status: line.

To a normal system user, there is no distinction between MTA and MUA --
they are both part of "mail".

>The most frustrating thing about figuring out how to chop up a mailbox
>file is knowing that the mail arrives in separate files, just like you
>want it.  

Mail arrives as input on STDIN, which can be read using the same calls
as reading a file but isn't the same thing. For one thing, you can't
rewind.

>The idiots who wrote the mail packages decided to join these
>files  into  one big one, eating up lots of cpu time to do so, just so
>that you and I would have to write programs to try to reconstruct  the
>original  separate files, eating up yet more cpu time.  

Of course, it is too much effort to use the documented features that
those "idiots" put into the mail system so that you can handle the
incoming mail as separate files. It is SO much easier to flame them.
Why not just take the mail as "separate files" as it comes in, writing
your own file locking code to handle simultaneous arrivals, and leave
the gratuitous insults at home?