On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 07:57:36AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > The traditional in-band delimiter has worked for 20+ years with > correctly written tools that do not mangle the messages. Sadly, not so. What character to you see at the the front of this next line? >From is used as the delimiter in mbox. And it can't tell the difference between From to start a new message and >From because I happened to start a line that way. And worse, this mangling is irreversible -- it's very possible that a quoted line in the body contains >From just naturally. The alternative -- using "Content-Length", is even more dangerous, because it can't be trusted. > Unix provides file locking mechanisms that allow different programs > to access mailboxes without corrupting them. As usual, if you > want to shoot yourself in the foot, it will happily hand you > the gun.... Over the years at least 3 different locking And all my users a gun of their own. All I know is: have a bunch of people on a system running pine, and every now and then you'll be fixing corrupt mbox mailboxes. You can argue all you want that these people aren't doing it right -- but I guess that's the _point_. > mechanisms have been used and no one is going to force you > to use the same one on all of your tools. However, it works > when done right and there is no reason to arbitrarily break > programs that have worked for years by changing the delivery > format. References: <http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html> <http://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html> -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
