Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!TRANSARC.COM!Craig_Everhart From: Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: Dear Saint Andrew... Message-ID: Date: 18 Jul 90 14:36:06 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 103 Adam and Nathaniel have filled in lots of good answers (including both ``here's how to do that, I think'' and ``here's a partial answer to your wish''). > Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 17-Jul-90 Dear Saint Andrew... > Lennart Lovstrand@Xerox. (7062+1) > I wish I wouldn't have to type M-@ to select a region [for further > kill-region, etc.] -- it's really confusing when moving between ez and > emacs. Simple--don't use emacs. (:-)) > I wish backup and checkpointing could be compatible with gnu emacs, ie. > #foo# for checkpoint and foo~ or foo~n~ for old versions. If ATK and Emacs could agree on semantic points.... > I wish there was support for setting tab stops! [What no tabs??! You > must be joking!] Right. But look at what named tabs did to Bravo, in the old days: made it almost slow enough to be unusable. > Printing hidden headers as footnotes is a nifty idea, but I wish it > could be turned off -- and when on, that they wouldn't be > (left-and-right) justified! The left/right-justified stuff sounds like a bug. Nathaniel and Adam already told you how to control this some, so maybe it will be more to your liking. > I wish Messages would show the messages in chronological order by the > Date: field -- as opposed to in the order they arrive, since messages > frequently get arbitrarily delayed during the transport and thus arrive > in a jumbled order. (Or is this already supposed to happen? But I have > messages that Sigh. You can re-sort your own folders by evaluated-Date: header value. AMS doesn't at present maintain more than a high-water-mark within a folder saying what messages you've seen, so messages are, by default, sorted by arrival time since that's the only way AMS can show you the ones you haven't seen yet. (Yes, it could micro-optimize the case where it's appending several messages at once, and sort those, but that's small payoff since it couldn't sort new messages to a spot before the last old message.) Substantial rewriting would have to take place to get this to work right. (The date parser doesn't handle time zones properly, either, so you'd get somewhat anomalous results.) > I wish Messages et al would allow me to directly control the appearance > of the captions -- what is shown as well as how it is presented. > (Seeing that a message is from "Mail D. Subsystem" instead of > "Mailer-Daemon" is kind of amusing, but there are worse cases.) As we built AMS (for use on Vice/AFS), we didn't want people to have to retrieve a message (that whole file) in order to see a one-line caption describing it. Our choice of what information to put in the caption line, which is simply one field in the ``snapshot'' in the .MS_MsgDir index file, was therefore global to all readers of a folder. Not ideal, it's true. > I wish Messages et al would allow more than just RFC822 addresses -- > even though my mail backend (sendmail) allows me to send both XNS and > UUCP formatted addresses, Messages insists on validating them as > "user@domain". [Is there a way to turn this off?] UUCP addresses should work a little bit, if you have the appropriate AndrewSetup option on. You might have asked for x.400/x.500 addresses as well. Good idea. > I wish AMS would properly retain the envelope sender as found in the > From_ line when retrieved from the user's mbox in /usr/spool/mail. As > it is now, at least the "X-Andrew-Authenticated-As" header is prepended > to the message, pushing the "From " line down into the body of the > headers (where it at least should be changed to a Return-Path: to > belong). Yes, this should be supported. If AMS thinks it's in an RFC822 world, it should convert the UUCP-ish envelope-from information to what it can understand. > I wish AMS wouldn't bluntly remove any user-supplied From: headers -- > they're perfectly legal and perform the useful task of indicating a that > the indicated sender is different from the (claimed) person sitting in > front of the keyboard. They're legal only if they work for a remote user. (At a college campus, it's been important for AMS to try to keep From: headers reasonably honest.) AMS might well have to add a Sender: header if the From: header wouldn't work, or maybe add a Reply-to: header as well. > I wish AMS wouldn't barf on a subject-less message (ugh!) Matter of taste. Like Nathaniel, I don't enjoy reading messages without subject lines; to me it marks a thoughtless message author. > I wish the mail applications would have been written to use a "real" > mail service protocol, talking to a "real" mail server, instead of > trying to rely on a global file system. It relies not on a global file system but on a local-area file system; the global file system extensions came later, and are not as integral. Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if it worked with POP and all the rest. > I wish the code wouldn't contain quite so many magic constants and > obscure defensive coding. I read this as a complaint more about the obscurity of the defensive coding than the defensive coding itself. Too bad that when we were cornered into making a defensive fix that we didn't comment the situation against which we were defending. Thanks for the list! It's good to go through it. Craig