Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!twg.com!david
From: david@twg.com (David S. Herron)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Who comments out the From_ lines?
Message-ID: <8134@gollum.twg.com>
Date: 22 Oct 90 17:11:33 GMT
References: <1990Oct21.160918.9684@smsc.sony.com>
Reply-To: david@twg.com (David S. Herron)
Organization: The Wollongong Group, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 29

In article <1990Oct21.160918.9684@smsc.sony.com> dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott) writes:
>When I was using a 4.3BSD machine, I found that mail messages
>containing lines beginning with the word "From " would be
>changed into ">From " by the mail system (it looks like it was
>rmail).

From_ to >From_ conversions are a sendmail-ism, so therefore I
don't have anything good to say about them ;-).  MMDF, of course,
does it better by using a non-printable string as the message
seperator.  You're gauranteed that "^A^A^A^A" doesn't appear
in messages because RFC-822 doesn't allow for it..

>Now that I've switched to SVR4, this no longer happens.  This
>means that programs like MH that expect the "From " to be
>a message separator get broken.  On the other hand, mailx and
>the other SVR4 mailers don't get confused by this.

The System V stuff looks for the pattern:

/^From user <ctime> remote from <blah>$/

Instead of just "From ".  Given that they're doing something stupid
by seperating messages with things which could naturally appear in
the text, this is a pretty good compromise.
-- 
<- David Herron, an MMDF & WIN/MHS guy, <david@twg.com>
<- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <david@ms.uky.edu>
<-
<- Remember:  On System V it's "tar xovf", not "tar xvf"!