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From: SCHAFER@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU (Richard A. Schafer)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mailbook
Subject: Re: BSMTP header
Message-ID: <900202.152206.CST.SCHAFER@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU>
Date: 2 Feb 90 21:22:06 GMT
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In-Reply-To:  Message of Fri, 2 Feb 90 14:22:30 CST from <KS06054@UAFSYSB>

On Fri, 2 Feb 90 14:22:30 CST Ken Schriner said:
>On Fri, 2 Feb 90 12:34:41 LCL Michael Wagner said:
>>I don't understand something very fundamental about this discussion.
>>Why not accept the changes to the header elements as requests from a
>>naive user to change the header as he has?
>
>As a naive user, yeah, how come.  I train a lot of users to use mail
>and basically, they never understand why they can't type over the stuff
>in the header.  Basically, me neither.  Full screen means the full screen,
>not just the text area.
Frankly, I agree.  But to be perfectly honest, I've just not had the time
to do that kind of work.  And it will be a fairly substantial amount of
work, by the way.

>>... I don't have a lot of sympathy for the sentiment, expressed
>>recently a lot on this list, of let the buggers freeze in hell if they
>>type over the headers rather than learning the extra handfull of
>>commands for manipulating the headers.
>
>I missed the mail about the buggers freezing in hell, too bad.  I understand
>the concept though.  It reminds me a lot of Ashton Tate's response to the
>dBase user community needing the ability to produce compiled code.  I'm with
>the users (and Michael Wagner).  I don't want to learn, or train, users
>to use the extra handful of commands.  I want to tell new users to MAIL,
>just type over the stuff in the header area to change it.
I think we can avoid too much of this by saying that this is a future
objective.  I will warn you of one thing, however: it's going to
cost you something, because it means that the code will have to do
a bunch of extra scanning of the header lines to make this work.

Which would you prefer: when the user types over the header lines and
produces something unparseable,

1. Notice the problem at that point (which means you have to scan the
   header lines *every* time a change is made)
2. Notice the problem only when you try to send the message (which means
   that the user won't be told when he or she makes the change but
   presumably quite a while afterwards, but does limit the amount of time
   spent scanning the header lines)

It occurs to me that maybe we're really barking up an entirely wrong
tree here.  Do we really want to have to depend on people entering
the exact syntax of an RFC822 address by hand?  (Don't forget to
put double quotes around the name if certain characters are in it;
remember to put those funny angle bracket things in the right places, etc.)
Maybe what we really need is a completely different way of looking at
the entire problem that allows full-screen changes, sure, but in
a less syntactically painful way.  This will require a lot of thought
to do right, but I'm not going to expend a lot of effort on manually
updating header lines if I can think of a different, but better way
of doing the same thing.

Richard