Re: definition of signature separator
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 05:58:25PM -0500, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
> but the ">" was inserted by procmail,
>
> If there is no Content-Length: field or the -Y option has been
> specified and procmail appends to regular mailfolders, any lines in
> the body of the mes‐ sage that look like postmarks are prepended
> with >' (disarms bogus mailheaders). The regular expression that is
> used to search for these postmarks is: \nFrom '
>
> and, in this case should be deamed harmless.
Except that it is difficult to undo, should we ever want to, due to the
choice of prefix string.
It would be a fair bit of work to modify mutt to optionally read
"mboxcl2" format, I expect. Easier would be for mutt to adopt "mboxrd"
format, which appears to solve the problem with only a minute format
change, avoiding the need for significant recoding of mutt.
Existing "mbox" files should not require conversion. Any "> From " guff
could harmlessly remain. Mutt could perform the "mboxrd" reversible
conversion before piping a new message to e.g. cryptographic applications.
Also, "mboxcl2" format seems to be undesirably vulnerable to the most
minor corruption, or presence of "Content-Length:" headers not of its
own making.
> I guess I just do not see a great enough problem to change, but I *am*
> getting along in *years*.
Having moved from "mail" to mutt around the time of SunOS 4.1.3, I don't
think I've seen anything other than "mbox" formats, since we started
receiving email over uucp, back in the days when only academia and
industry had internet, here in Australia.
Nor have I noticed, in several decades of use, any corruption in my 580
"mbox" files with half a gigabyte of content.
To avoid "gradually becoming irrelevant, and of only historical
interest", one _could_ just move to the "superior" maildir format, I
suppose. But in the old days inodes didn't grow on trees, and I for one
don't usually fix something that still works fine. (As far as I can
tell)
Erik
--
Meskimen's Law:
There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over.