🚀 go-pugleaf

In article les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
> In article gregg@cbnewsc.ATT.COM (gregg.g.wonderly) writes:
> 
> >> AT&T's PMX mailer products include a new /bin/mail that uses
> >> Content-Type: and Content-Length: headers to avoid the problem.
> 
> >  Once again
> >another format has been chosen that absolutely solves nothing!

> Of course you can destroy the structure by using a normal editor on
> the mailbox file but why would anyone do that?

I don't subscribe to the policy of editing email messages, but it's
done all the time, you you can't do anything about it.  Consider when
someone sends you a 30 page document and you just need 1 page of it;
or when someone sends you a phone number and you edit the message to
change the subject to have the phone number in it so you can see it
when you display headers... the list goes on.

> You can confuse any
> other MUA by adding or deleting some From_ lines.  Why is this any
> worse?

As I'm sure it's true with "any other MUA", Mush will allow you to edit
a message and when you're done, it makes sure that you have not added
any new "message separators" (e.g. From_ or ^A^A^A^A or ^C or whatever
your MTA uses) --if you did, it precedes the line with a '>' (it doesn't
matter what character you put there, the line must be modified).  It also
checks to see that you left the legal rfc-822 headers in.  the point is,
that you can allow message editing and keep sanity *given* the sanity of
the system you've got to work with.

> Personally, I'd like to see MTAs keep each message in a separate
> file which would eliminate the problem of finding the start of the next
> message and would allow links to be used for group messages.

In my opinion, the resolution to this problem will be determined by the
MTA that is shipped -off the shelf- with a unix system.  And I should
probably amend to that: any "popular" unix system.  That is, if BSD4.4
and/or AT&T S5R4 came out with a new MTA that did things differently,
we might see some changes.  But until that happens, the world will change
very little for most of us.  The introduction of the Content-* headers
is something entirely different from this -- once those messages get to
a system that doesn't use that MTA, then those headers have as much value
as pesos in Canada.  Even with those new headers, the folder format that
the MTA uses appears to be as it currently is.


dan <island!argv@sun.com>
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My postings reflect my opinion only -- not the opinion of any company.