🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MS-C.727558720.377401575.mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM> mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM (Mark Crispin) writes:
>Les Mikesell:
>
>     I am familiar with quite a few mailbox formats.  mbox is easily
>the worst of the bunch.  But it had one great saving grace; you could
>edit the mailbox file with a text editor.  Now, thanks to some cretins
>in the ``consider it standard'' SysV world, that sole advantage has
>been destroyed.

Well, you can always remove the Content-Length header.  Then, the SVR4
and SunOS (I presume) MUAs wil go back to the old method.  However, you
will have to put the > back in from the of any "From " lines.  Also,
the base SVR4 mailx (perhaps the mailx from Sun, too) requires a > in
front of "from ", as well (which is QUITE annoying).

Personally, I like the new format.  It is the only UNIX mbox file format
that can handle arbitrary binary, and it also makes SVR4 mailx MUCH
faster at reading very large mbox files.

With respect to editing mbox files, mailx has an edit command for
editing messages within an mbox file.  Other MUAs should, too.  This
command adjusts the Content-Length fields automatically.  I admit that
you can't edit the mbox file directly, but its better to do that kind
of thing with locks in place, anyway, which requires a structured
program for doing the editing, such as mailx.
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