In its last incarnation the Readmail program could read, but could not delete messages in Soup (or Yarn) binary format. In earlier mail, I suggested a workaround for this: Tell readmail the messages are in non-binary format, and specify the start of each message header by the first alphanumeric strings you could reliably expect to be in the first line of the header. I was wrong abou this solution. I will work partially in that, as long as you use only readmail, the solution will indeed allow you to delete individual messages and the software will track the messages accordingly. However, this solution will not always, or even usually preserve the integrety of Soup (or Yarn) headers. The latter signals the start of each message header with the size of the whole message, in bytes, expressed as a number in modular 8 arithmetic (instead of the usual mod 10). Of course, one of the bytes that is part of this number may well correspond to the ascii value that is the code for a line feed and/or a carrage return. If that happens, any scanner like readmail's, that is looking at ascii ``lines'' one at a time, will interpret part of the number that specifies the size of the message, as the end of a line. It will throw way any part of the number before this ``end-of- line'' and get everything wrong during a message delete. I expect the way most software parses Soup headers is via a linked list approach: Read the first 4 bytes of the file to find the size of the first message, goto to that offset, and read the next 4 bytes for the size of the next message, etc. With that approach, even a single byte missing or abnormally present will throw off the parsing of all the messages. Thus, SOUP mail programs will be unable to read a mail file after readmail deletes some messages from it. If I am correct on this, what is the advantage of such a demanding header format? Why is it not better to just pick a distinctive string, like the Unix ``From '' to start each header? To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies.
