> From: Erik Reuter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 12:45:21PM -0500, The Fool wrote: > > > From: Richard Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > > The Fool said: > > > > > > > The real question is what kind of filtering software inserted ">" > > > > before 'From', after my sending and before my recieving. > > > > > > As far as I know, all mail transfer agents do that so that computers > > > using Unix mailboxes don't get confused and think that a leading "From" > > > is a new email. > > > > If all unixices have such bad parsing that they can't tell the difference > > between message headers and message bodies, it's no wonder very few > > outside the high end corporate world use them. > > It is more complicated than that. The BSD mbox format has been around > for (I think) around 20 years. I imagine the originator had no idea > how widespread it would become, and just used a simple kludge for the > message delimiter. But now, a lot of programs expect certain behavior, > so changing is difficult. Here are some more details: > > http://wp.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/content-length.html
This is a perfect example of what my instructors describe happens when people make quick-fix, kludgey, code. It never dies. It comes back and bites you in the ass. It gets used for twenty years. I can come up with a better parser, in about a minute without using a YACC. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
