replacement for netscrape mail

[John Abreau]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

bscott at ntisys.com writes:

>   (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.)

I believe the specification for the mbox envelope was originally 
of the form 

    From sender-address  date

That's "From", space, sender-address, two spaces, date. This was the 
format of the UUCP envelope as well. 

As I recall, the convention of quoting all lines beginning with "From " 
came about later, after a number of mail readers were written without 
observing the undocumented, ad-hoc specification carefully. Of course, 
the only "official" spec back then was the source code to /bin/mail. 


- --
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9
PGP-Key-Fingerprint 72 FB 39 4F 3C 3B D6 5B E0 C8 5A 6E F1 2C BE 99


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001

iQCVAwUBPgOVT1V9A5rVx7XZAQJx/gP+LRLRT53pivHGZIsyO9XTux8qMGiW3mg+
zPgcAaoxhsVO3BNNEgIA+L9gvQV8W7MyegMdfHb9RaZedfPm0Lkq19IRVp5Jpecm
SkxG8kAHEGkomPmdpXnQs5m7fRpagh0Yh/ZRa+9UTtVbbYHvp3SXqR61A68P5Bw4
X2CcjWicm4s=
=0z/b
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----