Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!mouse From: mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse) Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer Subject: Re: mbox format? Message-ID: <1991Jul1.003334.10719@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> Date: 1 Jul 91 00:33:34 GMT References: <4426@rwthinf.UUCP> Organization: McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines Lines: 40 In article <4426@rwthinf.UUCP>, berg@physik.tu-muenchen.de (Stephen R. van den Berg) writes: > The most common mailbox format (sendmail, smail or compatible > environment) Sendmail does not know the mailbox format. You can use sendmail perfectly well with a local mailer that uses some other format; just redefine whatever mailer is used by the rule(s) in S0 that do(es) local delivery. (Usually this mailer is called "local".) > is defined as follows: > Every occurrence of the following "Regular Expression" marks the > beginning of a new mail message: > \n\nFrom +[^\t\n ]+ +[^\n\t] > Any mailbox file should start with a line conforming too: > From +[^\t\n ]+ +[^\n\t] > No, I did not find this in the manual, I just figured this out by > trial and error from the /usr/ucb/mail program included with SunOS. In that case, you are hardly justified in saying that's how it's *defined*. At best that may be what Sun chose to implement. > Many programs erroneously allow *any* line starting with 'From ' to > mark the start of a message (not even checking if the preceding line > was empty either). This is not necessarily erroneous; absent a real spec, that's as valid a way to mark the start of a mail message as any other. There are probably UAs and local delivery agents in the world that *do* use that (ie, something matching "^From ") as the marker for the beginning of a message. der Mouse old: mcgill-vision!mouse new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu