replacement for netscrape mail

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Fri, 20 Dec 2002, at 2:31pm, bobbell at zk3.dec.com wrote:
> As an FYI, beware that because mbox isn't a real standard ...

  Is too.  ;-)

  The problem with email, in general, is that because it is so useful a
thing to have, a great many different programmers have tried implementing
email software at one time or another.  Not all of them take the time to
read the standards (de facto or otherwise).  Not all of them know there are
standards.  Not all of them them know what a standard *is*.  The result is
that you get programs that work some of the time, on some data, but not all
of it.

  This problem affects not just mbox format mail storage.  There are some
incredibly broken SMTP and POP3 implementations out there, too, for example.  
Microsoft produced several of them.  ;-)

  (FWIW, BSD mbox is defined as follows: Simple text file.  Every message is
preceded with a 'From ...' line.  Messages are RFC-822 format.  Multiple
messages are separated by blank lines.  Thus, a blank line followed by a
line starting with 'From ...' indicates the start of a new message.  That
pattern must NOT occur within a message body.  If you have a message that
contains that pattern, you must change it somehow before writing it to the
mailbox.  This is traditionally done by pre-pending a right-angle-bracket
(>)  to the 'From', yielding '>From'.  RFC-822 and the format of the 'From'
line are described elsewhere.)

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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