Robert Elz <[email protected]> wrote: ... |If the mbox encoding format had been properly designed, rather than just |a "we need some way to fix the problem that a line starting 'From' in |a message acts like a separator" (which was a real issue/bug in early |implementations of it) this issue wouldn't arise.
It seems it has been simply be carried along from original Unix mail storage, and never has been properly adjusted thereafter. POSIX also standardized this loose format which was in use since that beginning. RFC 4155 defined a more proper format. In the end MBOX is just a database format, the MUA i maintain uses a MIME content-encoding to ensure the assertion of this format is not contradicted, but we do not yet re-encode messages like that when copying over, for that we have to perform proper From_ quoting as necessary, then. This is a huge pile of cr.p. Still, using RFC 4155 rules for one lowers the possibilities for database format clashes, and may give surprises due to different detection of message boundaries, our upcoming version will warn when opening mailboxes where this could be a problem. |There was one attempt to use (essentially, though as I recall, not quite |implemented that way) out of band data for mail collection files - that |is, adding a header and length field (much like tar format, or cpio, etc, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape+ on that[1] is pretty famous: [1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html |but much simpler) but which was a spectacular failure, and hated much more |than '>From' (which is mostly an annoyance, though it does screw integrity My MUA strips those because it doesn't manage them, unless the variable *keep-content-length* is set. I think i have to obsolete this, and at some future time either silently drop or fully support them. But they are redundant if messages are content-encoded, and in times of digital signatures etc. you need to make sure that user input is identical to output anyway, so proper content-encoding is the right thing to do. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt) _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
