* Karsten M. Self (kmself@ix.netcom.com) [010927 13:45]: > I've been noticing this on a number of messages both from and to me. > > Some lines beginning with 'From' are rewritten as '>From'. Needless to > say, this utterly borks things like GPG signatures. > > I have no idea where this is happening (I run exim, fetchmail and mutt), > or even if it's characteristic of my system, my ISP > (Earthlink/Mindspring), or other mail intermediaries.
It happens when the message is pounded into mbox format, which sillily uses "^From " to mean "here's where a new message starts". So any lines beginning with "From " in the message need to be escaped to ">From ". When delivering to an mbox, it goes like this: 1. lock the mbox file 2. Create a "From " line that has the envelope sender and date in it, and append it to the mbox file. 3. pipe the message through "s/^From \(.*\)/>From \1/" and append that output to the mbox file. 4. unlock the mbox file. The whole thing's rather silly. > Suggestions? Use maildir? No locking. One file per message. allows you to use fun things like find, grep, and xargs to play with your messages, instead of using carefully constructed scripts and risking catastrophic (whole mbox) loss by a single file corruption. > Peace. good times, -- Vineet http://www.anti-dmca.org Unauthorized use of this .sig may constitute violation of US law. echo Qba\'g gernq ba zr\! |tr 'a-zA-Z' 'n-za-mN-ZA-M'
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