mbox format?

[der Mouse]

In article <4426 at rwthinf.UUCP>, berg at physik.tu-muenchen.de (Stephen R. van den Berg) writes:

> The most common mailbox format (sendmail, smail or compatible
> environment)

Sendmail does not know the mailbox format.  You can use sendmail
perfectly well with a local mailer that uses some other format; just
redefine whatever mailer is used by the rule(s) in S0 that do(es) local
delivery.  (Usually this mailer is called "local".)

> is defined as follows:

> Every occurrence of the following "Regular Expression" marks the
> beginning of a new mail message:
> \n\nFrom +[^\t\n ]+ +[^\n\t]

> Any mailbox file should start with a line conforming too:
> From +[^\t\n ]+ +[^\n\t]

> No, I did not find this in the manual, I just figured this out by
> trial and error from the /usr/ucb/mail program included with SunOS.

In that case, you are hardly justified in saying that's how it's
*defined*.  At best that may be what Sun chose to implement.

> Many programs erroneously allow *any* line starting with 'From ' to
> mark the start of a message (not even checking if the preceding line
> was empty either).

This is not necessarily erroneous; absent a real spec, that's as valid
a way to mark the start of a mail message as any other.  There are
probably UAs and local delivery agents in the world that *do* use that
(ie, something matching "^From ") as the marker for the beginning of a
message.

					der Mouse

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