Delimiter of a standard mail spool file.

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3 total messages Started by Eric A. Litman Fri, 10 Apr 1992 01:05

#234

Author: Eric A. Litman
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 01:05

11 lines
890 bytes

Could somebody please tell me what the standard delimiter of a mail
spool file is? I would like to write a script that tells me how many
messages I have total, the number new, and the number unread (as does
Mail upon startup). I have written one that does this, but it chokes on
forwarded messages when I grep for Message-Id: (I gave up on From: ).

Thanks in advance.
-Eric

P.S. If somebody has already written something to do this (preferrable in
C, that would be nice, too  :-)

Re: Delimiter of a standard mail spool file.

#235

Author: Eric W. Ziegast
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 05:20

18 lines
1060 bytes

> Could somebody please tell me what the standard delimiter of a mail
> spool file is?

"\n\nFrom" where "From" is the beginning of the message.
At the beginning of the spool, there are no leading returns.

Basically, if the last line you read was a blank line and your
current line starts with "From":

	!strncmp(buffer ,"From ", strlen("From "))

you're at the beginning of a message.  Usually, just a leading
"From " is enough since a good mailer will escape other instances
of "From " as ">From ".
--
Eric Ziegast

PS: Code above stolen from MH.

Re: Delimiter of a standard mail spool file.

#237

Author: John Stanley
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 18:14

59 lines
1800 bytes

In article <1992Apr10.010511.11691@wam.umd.edu> elitman@wam.umd.edu (Eric A. Litman) writes:
>Could somebody please tell me what the standard delimiter of a mail
>spool file is? 

/^From /

>P.S. If somebody has already written something to do this (preferrable in
>C, that would be nice, too  :-)

Uggg. You probably put iron rimmed wagon wheels on your car, too.

Perl follows:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

# scan a mail file for mail
# I am tired of mail's format and speed (lack of).

$mail = "/usr/spool/mail/@ENV{'USER'}";
if( $#ARGV == 0 ) { $mail = shift; }
$count = 1;

open( MAIL, $mail ) || die "No mail for you.\n";

while( 1 ) {
   
    while( <MAIL> ) {

	if( eof ) { exit 0; }

	do {
		$pathfrom = $1;
		$status = $from = $subject = "";

		while( <MAIL> ) {
			chop;
			$from = $' if /^From: /;
			$subject = $' if /^Subject: /;
			$status = $' if /^Status: /;
			last if /^$/;
		}

		$_ = $from;
		$from = $1 if /(<\S+>)/;
		$from = "<$1>" if /([\w-\.]+)\s+\(/;

		$status = "N" if $status eq "";
		
		$line = sprintf ("%2s %2d: %s From: %s (%s)", 
			$status, $count, $subject, $from, $pathfrom);
		print substr($line, 0, 75);
		print "\n";
		$count++;

	} if /^From (\S+)/;

    }

}

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