On Sat, 27 Aug 2016, Ralph Corderoy ralph-at-inputplus.co.uk |s-nail| wrote:
> The ~/dead.letter created by s-nail's mail(1) isn't mbox format. It's > just a catenation of email bodies over time. (snip)... I've checked sendmail/deliver.c's mailfile()and it writes mbox (snip)... > So I guess I'm asking if anyone knows the history of this discrepancy? The s-nail behaviour is the same as that of current mailx and I'm pretty sure of all versions of Gunner Ritter's nail, from which mailx descends. My memory could be faulty, but I think I remember the mail program of the unix from Bell Labs on a pdp11-40 behaving the same way in 1975. That predates sendmail; mail could only go to other users of the same machine. I think the intention was that you could read the text back into a new message that you were composing. See the ~d command. Having headers in the file would make that messy. I don't personally care one way or the other, but you asked for history... Stephen Isard ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ __________________________________ S-nail-users@lists.sourceforge.net
