On 5/8/20 6:04 AM, Tim via users wrote:
On Fri, 2020-05-08 at 01:44 -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
In my mail files each message is followed by a blank line
before the next "From_" line. Is that a requirement of
mbox format? If so, it may be necessary to add it to
the crontab output.
It's how mbox works, each email is concatenated into one huge file, and
that's the separator (a blank line, then a "from" line at the beginning
of the next message). i.e. It's an mbox thing, not a general email
thing.
Of course, it's entirely possible for someone to write an email,
starting off a new paragraph with the word from, and that'll confuse
the heck of dumbly written email software. Typically, they'll split
the email there, you'll only see what appeared before it, and the rest
of the mail will be completely lost.
Well I kind of just did exactly that by pasteing in an email that was in
the mbox!
Of course, I am sending email with rich html, so it is not received as
just a plain text file to mess up anyone using an mbox reader.
Got to love this stuff. Otherwise you would go crazier!
I say dumb, because it's well known that people might write an email
that way, they should't have to word their emails some other way, and
email software should be able to handle it, one way or another. The
usual way is that some mail handler will add a character into the text,
somewhere, to make it different (e.g. shove a > in front, or add
another character after the word from). That could be your own email
program, munging the message as it sends it (another dumb thing), or it
could be an email server munging messages as it passes through them
knowing that *it* is going to store its messages in a mbox file (just
acceptable), or some email server munging messages passing through it
in case some other mail server can't handle it (another dumb thing).
Another way of handling it is for your mail server to not use a from
line, and be able to ignore the word "from" appearing in a message.
Whether that be using some other non-standard message separation method
of their own, or an addition (such as adding details to the "from line"
about the length of the message, so the server doesn't break apart
messages when the word "from" appears before the end of the message),
or a different mail storage technique. e.g. Maildir stores each email
as a separate file, so doesn't need to use that technique.
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