On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 06:18:35PM -0500, Kurt Hackenberg wrote: > On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 06:05:34PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > > > The message separator is the string "\nFrom " arguably followed by > > additional > > text which is not a newline, and then a newline. Messages which have > > paragraphs in the body which start with From should do one of: > > > > 1. escape that From (ONLY if preceded by a newline) > > 2. Use the Content-Length header to mark where the message ends > > 3. Use quoted-printable encoding or some other well-known and > > well-supported encoding to alleviate the need to escape the > > "\nFrom " line. > > That would be nice. Unfortunately, mbox files in the wild are not that > reliable.
By and large, yes, they are. How do I know? Because Mutt has been dealing with this for over 30 years, and this has only been reported as a problem for people extremely rarely. And their MDA/mail provider has always been at fault. > In practice, software that attempts to read almost all mbox has to do > heuristics. Which Mutt has always done, very reliably. > Attempting to recognize a date-time at the end of a From_ line > is one such heuristic -- not guaranteed to work, but improves the odds. No, it does nothing useful, especially if you're not actually going to do something with the data, and it CAN'T do that robustly. We know for a fact that not all mailers even add a date (though most do), and of those that do there are too many possible different formats to be able to reliably parse it. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
