🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9712241446.3nyj@pierrot.co.uk>
           tez@pierrot.co.uk "Terrance Richard Boyes" writes:

> Claire (9712q$cl@siberia.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> > 
> > ..
> > something like this must be required on UNIX systems, or on any
> > others that use the "From " lines as message separators, so I
> > assume that its use is widespread.
> 
> Yep, sendmail does the conversion here, so all incoming/outgoing mail
> with a From at the start of a line gets the ">" prepended. As far
> as mailreaders are concerned surely they should do the conversion.

You haven't used PCElm then :-)  Well, in its default state
anyway which uses "From " as mail separator.  Incoming mail
is fine because ka9q prepends the '>' as described, and
outgoing mail is presumably handled similarly by the receiving
smtp server.  The problem is with PCElm's "sent" files which
are written transparently - any body text with lines beginning
"From " are interpreted as the start of the next message if
one attempts to look at them; the index shows entries like
"From: somebody".  This is obviously workaroundable by defining
and using a specific "smtp separator" (in both ka9q and PCElm)
but by the time one discovers this one's mailbase is large
enough to be not worth the effort of postfixing it.  (I keep
promising myself to write a mailbase converter, but always
manage to find something else to do...)

> 
> > It doesn't seem to me like a big problem, anyway.
> 

I'd agree with that - annoying but not big.  Perhaps the best
solution would be for those nice Demon (who support the DOS
DIS suite) to supply the DIS package with a default "smtp
separator" setting (eg. @@@@) in both autoexec.net and PCElm
and the problem above would not arise.  If a separator were
mandatory, one could dispense with the '>' processing.

However, as Michael Salem said earlier in the thread, it's
pretty simple to patch your net.exe if you don't want the
aggro of fixing the source and recompiling.  It's impossible
to give a definitive patch here as there are now so many
versions of NET about, but as an example using the GremNOS
textwin-lite .EXE changing the byte at offset 2012Dh in the
EXE from 74h (JZ) to EBh (JMPS) will prevent addition of
the '>' by the smtp server.

However, using such a method though to add in the necessary
code to check the "smtp separator" setting would take much
more effort, and probably better done at source.

Pete
(Who might well get around to writing that converter if
 mother-in-law becomes unbearable...)
-- 
Pete
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