🚀 go-pugleaf

I've read through the recent thread (twice) regarding problems with
lines starting 'From ', and I'm still left wondering about something.
Starting my own thread as I'm going to have to mention (but only
vaguely) the "W" O/S I know is so popular round here :)

To begin with, if I were to make the following assertions regarding
e-mail in general, would I be essentially correct?

1) MUA's like PCelm and Pegasus are obviously *only* concerned with
their own local storage requirements.

2) MTA's like KA9Q and WinDIS have to modify an incoming message when it
would otherwise break local storage conventions - e.g by prepending
'From ' with a '>' character. I'm not at all familiar with KA9Q's code,
but I'm assuming this is part of the SMTP server mechanism.

3) The question then is, would it be correct or desirable to apply the
same modifications to an *outgoing* message - i.e. destined for another
host whose storage conventions are unknown.

My sudden interest in this was sparked by a newly discovered bug in
WinDIS. Basically it does *not* prefix any incoming message with a line
beginning 'From ' *when* the line is actually part of the RFC822 headers
- within the body it does prefix correctly.

This triggers in at least the following case; when forwarding a message
between two users using the following software setup, and electing to
*not* edit the message before forwarding :-
     WinPmail <--> PM-Demon <--> WinDIS

Upon receipt of the forwarded message, it has an extra 'From ' embedded
in it's headers, which cause it to be broken into 2 separate posts - the
1st part consisting of a few "Resent-from:" type headers, the 2nd being
the original message without any forwarding information.

I'm toying with the idea of modifying PM-Demon to attempt to compensate
for this. Tricky (if not impossible) with an incoming message - but the
real question is would "fixing" the header prior to forwarding an
outgoing message be a good idea? While it would fix the problem on the
receiving system, could it introduce problems on other non KA9Q/WinDIS
systems? Any thoughts? I'm already considering alternative software, but
this is primarily for a non computer-literate friend attempting to run a
simple mailing list under Pegasus, and would prefer :-
a) not to have to retrain them too much :)
b) retain as much KA9Q compatibility as possible for other software in
use.

Thanks,
Dave.

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     (0 0)    Dave Scott   e-mail: dave@roborat.demon.co.uk
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