Baurjan Ismagulov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Tue, 06 Jun 2000:
> i'm pretty sure this is not mda problem since i can check the mailbox on
> the server just before fetching the mail; it contains the correct line,
> which gets corrupted after i suck it to the "client" (i.e., my desktop
> machine) with mutt.
>
> your experience with fetchmail makes me think that it is rather a
> "feature" of one of the related protocols (pop3 or smtp message format
> in general (is there such a thing?)).
>
> could anyone confirm (or, better, deny)?
I can't give you absolute proof, but I have some idea of the situation.
The "From " (or From_ as it's sometimes called) is not a real header.
It's just a construct in the mbox folder format that acts as a message
separator and happens to contain the envelope sender information and
time received for the message.
When email messages are in transit, both envelope sender and recipient
are pieces of information that are relayed *outside* of the actual
message data, as part of the SMTP protocol. The mail delivery program
knows what the envelope sender information is and so can write it to the
mbox folder format.
When you retrieve a message with POP, I don't know what the protocol
says but I *think* that there is no way to retrieve the envelope sender
for any message you access via POP. So if you have a POP server that
follows the standard strictly and returns *only* the actual message
data, this does *not* include the "From " line because that's only a
folder format specific line, not part of the message proper.
Some mail servers/delivery programs will add the envelope sender and
recipient information in real (custom) email headers in the message at
delivery time. Since the information is in proper email headers, they
are then transmitted over POP as well. In this case the POP server
isn't transmitting the envelope sender in any specific way, it's just
passing the custom header along with all the other headers.
Hope that helps... I haven't ever used Mutt's built in POP support,
and didn't really experiment. So the above is only based on email
theory, not actual observed behaviour. :-)
Regards,
Mikko
--
// Mikko Hänninen, aka. Wizzu // [EMAIL PROTECTED] // http://www.iki.fi/wiz/
// The Corrs list maintainer // net.freak // DALnet IRC operator /
// Interests: roleplaying, Linux, the Net, fantasy & scifi, the Corrs /
Be nice to other people. They outnumber you 6 billion to one.
