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From: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Heller)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: The topmost From line in a message
Message-ID: <10928@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 10 Mar 89 22:23:00 GMT
References: <4820@pbhyf.PacBell.COM>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Dan Heller)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 43

In article <4820@pbhyf.PacBell.COM> rob@pbhyf.PacBell.COM (Rob Bernardo) writes:
>This is a question about allowable formats for the topmost "From "
>line in a mail message.
>
>The question is: Is smail broken and disobeying the standard, or
>should ELM tolerate topmost from lines of such format?

First, it should be noted that there is no "standard" when it comes 
to "From " lines in folders.  This is not part of the message headers
in a message and therefore causes havok with allo sorts of user agents
that try to read this header.

there are many different formats used, mostly differing in the format of
the "date" specified:

>ELM only recognizes lines of the format
>	From [logname] [date]
>as the beginning of a mail message.

Elm might gag on certain date formats and inadvertently cause two
consecutive messages to be concatenated together.  I don't know this
for sure, but many elm-to-mush converts have indicated to me that their
version had done this wrong at times.  Due to the many different versions
of Elm that are out there, I can't say whether this has been fixed or not.

>with first lines of the format
>	From [logname] [date] remote from [host]
>Now I see those in messages but never as the *topmost* line.

It's true that this is very unusual, and altho Mush will parse this
message correctly, chances are high that the return address of the
author of the message might be incorrect.  Typically, uucp hosts
running older versions of binmail or whatever will generate lines
that look like:
    From uucp [date]
    >From user [date] remote from <path>
    ...
The number of >From lines may vary depending on the path and the
mailers involved, but since this is the most commonly used method,
using the format you mention above is inadvisable even tho there
is no "standard" being broken.

Dan Heller	<island!argv@sun.com>