On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 01:46:55AM +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> Derek Martin wrote in
> [...the file format]
> ...
> |it defines is basically worthless, given the many millions of lines of
> |code and probably also millions of users which employ a long-standing
> |alternative implementation. It's too much to ask for all of the
>
> No. In fact Dr. Fink was absolutely right in pointing out that
> all these implementations have always been wrong, since the email
> standard requires 1+ (actually 2+) header fields to occur in
> a valid email [...]
You seem not to understand that the "e-mail standard" (presumably RFC
822 and its descendants) defines how mail must be sent on the wire, not
how it is stored on disk... and quite expressly so. From section 1.1:
Note: This standard is NOT intended to dictate the internal for-
mats used by sites, the specific message system features
that they are expected to support, or any of the charac-
teristics of user interface programs that create or read
messages.
Conceptually speaking, the two are entirely unrelated. Clearly there
is value in preserving what was sent for the user's benefit, but the
format in which it is preserved on disk need not bear any resemblance
to how it is transmitted, so long as what must be preserved can be
stored and retrieved accurately and repeatably. Likewise for
everything you said about MIME: It's a transfer encoding, not a
storage format. Neither thing dictates how the data must be stored on
disk, nor do they pretend to.
The only time when the on-disk format matters AT ALL (other than
performance considerations) is when you are trying to interoperate
with other programs that you intend also to read or write your on-disk
data format. If that's what you're trying to do, you'd best copy what
that other program does, if it came before yours, or if it uses a
known format that precedes yours. In this case, there are multiple
competing similar formats (the mbox variants aren't even the only
ones, though they are by far the most widely used), so if you intend
to be universally compatible, then as the newcomer, it falls to you to
mimic what the establishment is already doing, even if it means
heuristically discerning between multiple similar formats. You
certainly may try to persuade other author(s) to convert to your
format, but you most certainly should not expect success, especially
when their chosen alternatives have been in use world-wide for half a
century, without much incident by and large for the overwhelming
majority of users.
Much of the rest of what you wrote seems to be based on the same false
assumptions, and in any case I believe I've already adequately
addressed the issue.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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