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From: jerry@ORA.ORA.COM (Jerry Peek)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: A better way to "comment out" forwarded message headers?
Message-ID: <m0j6MZ2-00009HC@ora.ora.com>
Date: 13 Feb 91 13:30:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 55

Anybody have a better way to solve this problem?

I get a lot of messages that have been re-sent (or re-re-sent...) by people
who don't have the MH "dist" command.  The message they want me to see is
buried under layers of header text, encapsulated in other messages, like this:

	Miscellaneous-headers: ad nauseum
	From: alix
	To: jerry
	Subject: Sandy sent this; you should read it
		...note from alix about message...
	More-miscellaneous-headers: etc etc
	From: sandy
	To: alix
	Subject: Important message
		...more stuff I don't want to read...
	From: bigboss
	To: alix
	Subject: Draft of Plan B
		...this is the message I want! ...


I want to keep the original headers in case I need them later.  But I don't
want to wade through them most of the time.  When I scan, I want to see this:
	1234 02/23  bigboss     Draft of Plan B
instead of the mostly-useless:
	1234 02/27  alix        Sandy sent this; you should read it
Also, when I show the message, I want to see the useful part right away.

The best fix I've come up with is a shell script that uses "ed" to add this:
	X-Original-Text:
to all lines (including empty lines) before the message I want to read.
Basically, this turns all the encapsulating messages into one big header.
After that, the message looks like this:

	X-Original-Text: Miscellaneous-headers: ad nauseum
	X-Original-Text: From: alix
	X-Original-Text: To: jerry
	X-Original-Text: Subject: Sandy sent this; you should read it
		...
	X-Original-Text:
	From: bigboss
	To: alix
	Subject: Draft of Plan B
		...this is the message I want! ...

I've also added a "x-original-text" component to the "ignores" variable
in my "mhl.format" file.  So, when I show the message, the lines
I see on my screen are the message I want to read; "mhl" doesn't show
the X-Original-Text: lines.

Do you have a better way to do this, besides deleting the forwarded
message headers or using "burst"?  Thanks.

--Jerry Peek, jerry@ora.com