} I've done some more investigating - if the "From date" is the first
} line in the mailbox, elm gives up with a corrupt mailbox error. If it is in
} a subsequent message, elm will start up, but join the 2 messages together.
That figures. A From line is basically
From <someone> <date>
The one that has been seen
From <nothing> <date>
where <nothing> is the empty string, is not valid, end is not
recognised by that version of Elm, nor by various pop servers etc...
An mbox should start with a From line or it is invalid, hence Elm
*should* reject the mbox which starts with the broken version of From
(whether it should then hack round the problems is for further
debate). If it aint the first line of an mbox then ignoring it
toally seems reasonable (although actually things are likely to
depend on whether you honour the Content-Length header.
As an additional problem, I have recently seen problems (in smail)
with messages where people have got spaces in the return address - ie
I have seen a line of the form
From "Fred Bloggs"@??? <date>
which breaks my pop server - and some other just as wierd varients!
X400 will do wonders for this as well - it'll break anything!
I would quite like the option for a broken config setting, which I
know is technically incorrect (hence broken), but could save grief,
of writing From lines with the sender edited into a form which
works... or maybe just replaced with <> if it fails a set of tests -
such as whitespace content or zero length.
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel.Metheringham@??? - Unix Applications Engineer ]
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