NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/comp/unix/wizards/4790

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-18 | 1.7 KB

Xref: sparky comp.unix.wizards:4790 comp.unix.shell:4781 comp.unix.misc:4247
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.misc
Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!machine!chinet!les
From: [e-mail] (Leslie Mikesell)
Subject: Re: The Problem with UNIX
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 21:55:55 GMT
Lines: 22

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Matthias Urlichs) writes:
>> This user says `bletch!'  I've got ELM.  It threw away a valuable piece of
>> mail on me because the mail included another mail header.
>
>So do yourself a favor and either use MMDF-style mailboxes (if your MTA
>can't create these, do yourself a favor and ... ;-) or tell your MTA to
>replace any occurrence of "\n\nFrom " with "\n\n>From ". Or something like
>that. You're going to have that problem with any mailer; it's not Elm's
>fault.

It's "sort-of" ELM's fault in this case.  The SysVr4 mailer encapsulates
messages with a Content-Length: header containing the number of characters
following the newline after the headers that comprise the body of the
message.  The content of the body is irrelevant and lines starting with
From are not escaped (and they can contain ^A^A^A's).  Version 2.4 of
ELM understands this but it's a configuration option.  It still isn't
quite right because ELM uses a separate utility to perform printing and
piping operations and that program still tries to identify messages
by the lines starting with "From ".

Les Mikesell
  [e-mail]