On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 12:10:21AM -0500, The Fool wrote: > Which is my point, they don't have to separate conjoined messages they > are already separate when they arrive. After twenty years one of the > first open source projects still hasn't come up with a better method > of storing messages that does not involve a stupid hack.
I disagree with "stupid". It was a simple kludge, definitely not an elegant design, but hardly stupid. UNIX was based on text, text pipes and text files. It allowed a huge amount of flexibility since all programs could easily interoperate with each other by inputing or outputing a stream of text to a file. It allowed everything to be modular. So, the MDA is separate from the mail reader. It made sense for the MDA to append each incoming message to the end of a text file, that is the UNIX way. That sort of behavior was largely responsible for the huge success of UNIX. >There is a reason why you design thing properly from the start, and >don't make code hacks. 20 years ago computers were much less powerful. You would probably suggest that the MDA would count the characters in the email and add a count to the header before it appended the email to the file. For computers back then, that would have required non-trivial amounts of computer memory and processor time. Especially if several big emails came in almost simultaneously (remember UNIX was multi-user and multi-tasking from the start). So, it wasn't "stupid" to make a simple kludge, it was expedient. Could it have been done more elegantly? Yes. Would it have been a better solution at the time? Maybe not. > Neither of those things was done, and they still haven't fixed the > issue on which the stupid hack was based. The stupid hack became the > standard. Again, the problem is compatibility. If the MDAs stopped mangling all the From lines, then scores (hundreds, perhaps) of mail readers and mail processing programs would break. And is the problem such a big deal? You have been using email, I presume, for years, and this is the first time you even NOTICED it. And it didn't really cause you any problems, it was just a curiousity. For fun, I tried to think up a way to fix it and preserve compatibility. (The URL I quoted earlier hinted at it). It would be to quote every instance of lines beginning with "From", ">From", ">>From", etc. with an additional ">". Then, the current mail handlers would not be broken, and the "aware" mail handlers would be rewritten to display emails by transforming lines beginning with ">From" to "From" and ">>From" to ">From" and so on. I think this would work reasonably well AND maintain backwards compatibility. Why hasn't it been done? I suppose because no programmer thought it was important enough to bother. But the source code is available. If it is important to you, just make the changes and submit them. Perhaps your name could go down in Internet history as the Fool who fixed the foolish MDA kludge. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
