Unix mail files

[Richard John Botting]

In article <1163:May2719:09:5690 at stealth.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd at stealth.acf.nyu.ed
u (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>
>Yep, exactly right. You'll also note that if a line in the text of a
>message starts with From and a space, the mailer adds a > to the line;
>that way mailreaders won't think that it starts a new message.
>
>To be precise, the separator is "\n\nFrom ".
Christopher R Volpe <volpe at underdog.crd.ge.com> adds
>The SunOS mail program that I use doesn't seem to use that as
>a separator. [...]
>Could there be some control characters inserted somewhere?

I would place small bet on 4 CTRL/A's
because this is what about 50% of our mail system does at silicon.???.csusb.edu.
The other half  doesn't put in these characters
(Please don't ask me why - I assume insanity on the part of the programmers)
(whio would doubtless prefer to reamin anonymous)

The fun starts when a third process parses mail...this appears to use the
FIRST line to determine what the seperator between the messages is.

In consequence we often find 6 or 7 or messages all masquerading as a
single one...

I wrote a script to clean my mail out, then some others tried it as well.
As of tonight it went into service from root - as a crontab...It reads:
: clean dumb sentinels from mail files
cd /usr/spool/mail
for mbox in *
do echo $mbox
ed - $mbox <<++++ 2>/dev/null
g//s///
w
q
++++
done

By the way - g//s/// is not what it appears to be you'll have to insert
4 CTRL/A's    ^here
:-)
Dr. Richard J Botting (The Aging Hacker)
Computer Science Dept
CalStateUniversity, San Bernardino.
rbottin at atl.calstate.edu
paaaaar at calstate.bitnet