From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Dec 2 11:06:32 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id LAA06132 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 2 Dec 1996 11:06:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from agora.rdrop.com (root@agora.rdrop.com [199.2.210.241]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA06122 for ; Mon, 2 Dec 1996 11:06:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com by agora.rdrop.com with smtp (Smail3.1.29.1 #17) id m0vUdh9-0008v0C; Mon, 2 Dec 96 11:06 PST Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id LAA10946; Mon, 2 Dec 1996 11:41:52 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199612021841.LAA10946@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Inferno for FreeBSD. To: wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de (Wolfram Schneider) Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1996 11:41:51 -0700 (MST) Cc: roberto@keltia.freenix.fr, hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <199612021141.MAA00264@campa.panke.de> from "Wolfram Schneider" at Dec 2, 96 12:41:19 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > >According to Wolfram Schneider: > >> Why we use a ">" and not a space or tab? A ">" may destroy > >> latex documents (see UNIX-HATERS handbook page 79-81). > >There are several ways to handle it: > >1. use "quoted-printable" as C-T-E: and =46 in place of "F", > > I vote for 1. It works for all mail clients and does not > destroy the mail body. It is not the MTA that screws this up. The problem is purely in the mailbox storage interface. The "From:" -> ">From:" conversion is a convenience for bad mailbox storage formats for evil MUA's which expect to access the mail through direct access to the mailbox, and then bogusly use the "From:" to demark message boundries. This is a nasty thing for them to do, since there is no exterior encapsulation of the messages as independent objects onces they are in the mailbox. If the MUA *must* do this, then an MTA that delivers everything into one huge file should change C-T-E:, as described above. (Bleah!). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.