Subject: [sup-talk] You've got the "From " bug, I'm afraid.

From: [email-masked] (Robin Lee Powell)
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:41:27 -0700

I'm trying out sup, coming from mutt, and I've hit what is, for me,
a show-stopper bug.

sup things that the line:

>From bob:

starts a new mail in mbox files.

I put lines like that all over the place in my mails.

-Robin

-- 
They say:  "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I'm thinking:  "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other than the default outcome?" -- http://shorl.com/tydruhedufogre
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:40:02 -0800

> I put lines like that all over the place in my mails.

Do those lines actually occur raw in the mbox files? Because this is
the standard, well-known mbox design flaw, but the solution is typically
for clients to write ">From" instead of "From " when adding messages to
the mbox.

If mutt writes those lines raw, then Sup may have to be more heuristic
in my mbox scanning. OTOH, we've had a large number of Sup users who
come from mutt (including me!), and I think you're the first who's
complained of this.
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>

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From: [email-masked] (Tomas Pospisek ML)
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:00:28 +0000

>come from mutt (including me!), and I think you're the first who's

I'm coming from (al)pine and alpine. There actually is a line like this
in the raw mbox:

----------------
blablabla
>From bla bli blu
bla bla bla
----------------

Apparently (al)pine doesn't quote, when there's not _an empty line_
before the "From" line. [1] seems to provide a little bit of a meager
reference.
*t

[1] http://qmail.org/qmail-manual-html/man5/mbox.html

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From: [email-masked] (Bart Schaefer)
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 17:16:51 -0800

> before the "From" line. [1] seems to provide a little bit of a meager

Pine and by inheritance alpine have a very strict view of what
constitutes valid syntax for the line that begins a new message in
mbox format.  It has to have the email address in the correct place,
the date has to be in the correct format, etc., or it doesn't count.
I believe it has a configuration option for whether it sticks a ">" in
front of lines that begin with "From " but don't have the entire
correct layout.

Other email clients have a much more liberal notion of what
constitutes a so-called From_ line.  Mush/Z-Mail, the email clients
that I used to work on (as in, write the C code for) 15 years ago,
would accept a fairly wide variety of formats, but they all had to
have an address and something resembling a date.

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From: [email-masked] (Tomas Pospisek ML)
Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:50:21 +0000

>have an address and something resembling a date.

Possibly (al)pine is following RFC 4155, that describes how the "From"
delimiter should look like down in Appendix A... ?
*t

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From: [email-masked] (Bart Schaefer)
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 03:21:32 -0800

> delimiter should look like down in Appendix A... ?

Given the history, I think it's equally likely that RFC 4155 follows
Pine. :-)  The original mbox driver from the UW c-client package
predates that RFC by nearly 20 years.  4155 is a case of documenting
folklore so that newcomers don't have to learn it by hearsay.

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From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:58:00 -0800

> folklore so that newcomers don't have to learn it by hearsay.

Okee doke, I've made an official ditz issue to replicate this
20-year-old piece of work.
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>