Re: [Nmh-workers] Thoughts: header/address parsing

[Ken Hornstein]

>    AT&T Message Center Version 1 (Apr 11 2006)
>    ELM [version 2.4 PL22]
>    Mailer::1.0 [Perl?]
>    slrn/0.9.5.7 (UNIX) [Usenet, I know]
>    [Some MTA error reports.]
>    XFMail 1.3 [p0] on Linux

So what percentage is that out of all the email you have?  Is there a
tapering off by year?

>and I gave up looking after a bit.
>
>And it continues to this day.
>
>    $ readlink -e `which mail`
>    /usr/bin/heirloom-mailx
>    $ mail ralph <$N
>    No message, no subject; hope that's ok
>    $ fgrep From: /var/spool/mail/ralph
>    From: address@hidden (Ralph Corderoy)

That looks like you set that directly with the "from" variable.

>I seem to vaguely recall being a bit surprised when seeing the `Foo Bar
><address@hidden>' instead and wondering how legal it was.  ;-)  So there
>must have been a transition at some point.

Looking back ... in RFC 822, you had two options:

mailbox = addr-spec                     ; simple address
        / phrase route-addr             ; name and addr-spec

Where:

addr-spec = local-part "@" domain

route-addr = "<" [route] addr-spec ">"

RFC 733 has similar ABNF.  It's worth noting that all of the examples
I've seen in RFC 733 and RFC 822 are in the "modern" form; it looks
like the other form was never recommended.  Also, the author of RFC 733
seemed to be a fan of Mad Magazine.

However, your point is well taken; I'll keep it in mind whenever I get
around to working on this hypothetical new parser :-/

--Ken