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From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Format of mail file in /usr/ucb/mail?
Message-ID: <1991Feb15.023018.960@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 15 Feb 91 02:30:18 GMT
References: <12372@darkstar.ucsc.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 50

In article <12372@darkstar.ucsc.edu> haynes@felix.ucsc.edu (99700000) writes:
>
>Is this documented anywhere?  There are several questions that keep
>arising.  Like, one person has a file of saved news articles that
>he used to be able to read with mail, but now mail -f <filename>
>tells him 0 messages.  In another case when you save news articles
>mail will show them with their titles, but after you read them
>mail doesn't show the titles anymore.  Can anyone explain?

 I don't know where it is documented.  But my experience show the following:

It consists of a sequence of messages.

Each message begins:

	From sender date_and_time

(I don't know how fussy it is about date, time.  It certainly accepts the
format of the 'date' command).

	Any number of lines of text.

	Empty line.

 The next message will not be recognized if there is no empty line preceding
it.

 Optionally the last header in a message can be 'Status:'.  If the Status:
header is absent the message is assumed new.  Otherwise the contents of
the header indicate whether unread or read.  I don't believe any other
headers are actually necessary, and with the appropriate parameters
/bin/mail can be coaxed into storing a message with no headers (after the
Unix From line).

 ---------------

 Some news software is just poorly designed for saving in mailbox format.
The following seems to apply to 'rn'.  If your environment requests saving
a copy of a mail reply (the MAILRECORD variable), Rnmail does not add the
beginning 'From ' or the trailing blank line.  Thus ucbMail will not
recognize any messages.  If you specified mailbox style saved messages, then
the 's' command will save them in that form if the mailbox does not exist.  If
the mailbox already exists it does a check.  Unfortunately a completely empty
mailbox fails the check, so 'rn' assume non-mailbox format when it saves.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940