Hello Stephen, "Stephen Isard" <[email protected]> wrote: |On Sat, 27 Aug 2016, Ralph Corderoy ralph-at-inputplus.co.uk |s-nail| \ |wrote: |> The ~/dead.letter created by s-nail's mail(1) isn't mbox format. It's |> just a catenation of email bodies over time. .. |The s-nail behaviour is the same as that of current mailx and I'm pretty |sure of all versions of Gunner Ritter's nail, from which mailx descends. |My memory could be faulty, but I think I remember the mail program of |the unix from Bell Labs on a pdp11-40 behaving the same way in 1975. |That predates sendmail; mail could only go to other users of the same |machine.
6th edition simply unlinks the old file and then writes the plain message as collected so far. |I think the intention was that you could read the text back into a new |message that you were composing. See the ~d command. Having headers in |the file would make that messy. For one yes, but i have changed my mind and the standard mandates $DEAD to be a valid (POSIX) MBOX. We now place the From_ line, and let's see what the future brings -- in the end we shouldn't loose any data, at least. Removing lines is easier than restoring content from memory, so that is for sure. (Ralph and myself had a short communication on the GNU tar bug ML last afternoon...) |I don't personally care one way or the other, but you asked for |history... What we really need would be a sophisticated (does-the-right-thing (tm)) postpone functionality. Etc. etc. Ciao, and also a nice Sunday ^_^ --steffen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ __________________________________ [email protected]
