🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <593574303wnr@roborat.demon.co.uk>
           dave@roborat.demon.co.uk "Dave Scott" writes:

> In article: <837432741snz@wash.demon.co.uk>  John Washington 
>   <john@wash.demon.co.uk> writes:
> .. 
> > A single newline character preceding a 'From '
> > is (I imagine) not sufficient to signal the start of a header.
> 
> You mean something like :-
>    blah\n
>    blah\n
>    \n
>    From ... 
> is required? Have to disagree - I'm pretty sure <blah\n><blah\n><From >
> is all that's actually needed, i.e. only the preceding line's C/R.

As far as PCElm is concerned <\nFrom > appears all that is 
necessary to signal the start of the next header.

[snip experiment time]
> 
> I tried viewing this with PCElm (1.10), FIMail (0.9d) and 
> NewsWin (0.9.1). All of them saw it correctly as two separate messages.

I believe the confusion occurs when a genuine <\nFrom > appears 
in the text body (and possibly in a malformed header too - I 
haven't tried that).  If one has text like:

From what you say, it seems ...
From an earlier posting you say ...

whether or not it's just <\nFrom > or <\n\nFrom > in the text 
body, PCElm treats it as the start of the next message :-(
(This is news, so I hope I didn't screw up anyone's mailbase 
by the above example...)  This seems reasonable, as scanning 
through ~spool/mail/pete.txt there is no consistent pattern
of <\n\nFrom > between articles, ie. ka9q seems not to inject
a <\n\n> between articles when filing them.

ISTM that PCElm is somewhat undiscerning (if not actually 
broken) in its interpretation of the .txt files.  Maybe yet
another item for Malcolm's wishlist when time permits (or
when entropy starts decreasing; whichever happens first:-)).

But hey - didn't this start off as a question on blank lines
between headers and bodies?
-- 
Pete