> In the case of my own ISP, the messages are truncated when the server
> finds a period being the first character of a line of text, even though
> many other characters follow on the same line.
> Do you think this is normal that the messages are truncated in this case?
> Or, do you think there might be a problem with my ISP's mail server?
> Hope there is someone on these lists who truly understands the
> consternations associated with periods.
Dont know if I ``truly understand'' but I know a little history. The
earlest mail clients, for instance ``mail'' and ``mailx'' that were
part of early Unix installations (e.g., Berkeley's BSD Unix 4.3),
interpreted a period that started a line as an end-of-message command.
You could actually set a variable for this, and Contrl-D tended to
always work. These programs needed this because the early mail programs
did not have anything worth calling an ``editor'' available when you
wrote the text of your message. Like other programs, like cat, you
just started typing lines, and had to signal each line ended by hitting
<ENTER> and that the whole message ended by hitting some special escape
character like period of ^D.
Early Unix and still many modern Unix came equipped with a markup language
called troff (for printed output) or nroff for screen output. In this
language, formatting commands were distinguished from regular text
by a period that started a line. Thus:
.ce
This line will be centered.
signaled the rendering program to center the following sentence, compared
to languages like html or sgml which would use markups more like:
<CENTER>
This line will be centered.
Consequently, various early Unix programs often interpreted lines that
started with a period, either as the end of a message, or as a markup
editing command that was not plain text. This ``smart'' behaviour
could often be turned on or off by setting options or variables. An
example would be versions of file cleanup programs or editors that could ignore
``troff constructs or commands''.
This is probably why Sendmail, the traditional Unix mail server, by
default interprets a period on its own line as end of message, which
is also standard for SMTP mail protocol. Sendmail does have a config
file or command line option, -i, which can be set to ``ignore leading
dots'' on lines.
I would not be surprised if some mail server used by your ISP, treats
lines with a leading dot as markup commands of some type as part of
being ``Unix smart''. It could not hurt to ask the ISP what mail server
it uses and if it can be configured to not treat leading dots as special.
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