On 18/06/20 8:08 am, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 08:02:11AM +1200, Richard Hector wrote: >> > See <https://jdebp.eu/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html> for more details. > >> I understand the phenomenon. I don't understand why modern software (eg >> the list software) still does it. > > Well, imagine you're a mailing list. A dozen people are subscribing > to you, and you have no way to know which MTA and mailbox formats each > of your subscribers is using. > > If you don't do the From mangling, and you send a message to > subscriber #7 who happens to be using a traditional /var/spool/mail > mbox format, the results could be undesirable -- #7 will see half a > message followed by a broken message.
If subscriber #7 can't deal with lines with a leading From, then surely they're going to see breakage with any such incoming mail, not just those from the list. And so if needed, their own mail system (MTA or MUA) will mangle the From lines. How is a message from a list fundamentally different? It doesn't supply me with an mbox file, it still sends a properly formatted email. Richard
