On Mon, 13 May 2002 15:43:52 +1000, Andrew Hatfield wrote: > > That is certainly not true. For all its (many) faults (and "many" can be > > called an understatement), traditional UNIX mailbox format is probably the > > single most robust and stable format ever devised. > > I have been experiencing (under numerous clients - OE, Mozilla, Outlook2K, > Squirrel) I've experienced lost email quite regularly. Hence my comment.
Is your mail store set up properly? Are the directory protections set properly? Are you using a delivery agent that is set up properly? Also - Before embarking on a project as sensitive as an email back end, I recommend that you read Internet Email Protocols: A Developer's Guide, by Kevin Johnson, published by Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-43288-9. Your question indicates to me that you lack pre-requisite knowledge. You're setting yourself up for some truly amazing frustration and thrashing around without that knowledge. The "simple" answer to your question is that there are many "required" header fields, with semantics which are far more complex than your question envisions. Another thing that needs to be called to your attention is that Message-ID is not something that is well represented by a 50-character string. At a minimum, if you decide to go down that route you will need data structures matching the IMAP ENVELOPE and BODYSTRUCTURE. You'll also need unaltered representations of the RFC 2822 format message. Other people have been down this road. You ought to talk with both the Cyrus folks at CMU and the Exchange developers at Microsoft. If you think that this will be a simple project, you are... uh... optimistic.
