Re: [Nmh-workers] Request Deprecation of mts.conf's mmdelim1 and mmdelim2.

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> wrote:
 |>It seems it has been simply be carried along from original Unix
 |>mail storage, and never has been properly adjusted thereafter.
 |>POSIX also standardized this loose format which was in use since
 |>that beginning.  RFC 4155 defined a more proper format.
 |
 |I think there are two things that are being conflated here: the
 |various "standards" of the mbox format, and nmh's use of it.
 |
 |Since nmh doesn't use mbox as a mail store, things like RFC 4155 aren't
 |really relevant; we don't deal with mbox files except for two specific
 |tools.  So our goal here is to deal with existing mail DROPS (I use
 |that term to specify a place where external tools store mail where nmh
 |can read it).

Well, using RFC 4155 parse rules for From_ lines can lead to
different message boundary detection.

 |Of course, the more I dig into it the more fun I find.  For example:
 |
 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
 |
 |Which suggests that SOME mbox formats do perform reversible
 |From-munging.  Urrrk.

I removed that from the MUA i maintain, because you never know for
sure: for that you would need to scan the entire message first,
check if several From_ lines occur and have been quoted alike,
before you start to remove what you think is a superficial From_
quote.  And then ezml i think it was (what unicode.org had before
the switch to i think mailman) simply placed a space in the first
column...  Any non truly-reversible change changes the original
content, applying a MIME content-encoding is standardized, there
you go.

 |This suggests to me that a "next-gen" maildrop parser should be prepared
 |to handle what Wikipedia calls "mboxo" and "mboxrd" format.  A web page
 |linked to on that page suggests that on Linux Content-Length variants
 |(mboxcl and mboxcl2) are more common on Linux, but I am skeptical that
 |is true.

mutt actively manages these header lines, at least.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)