On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, Paul Slootman wrote:
> Well, RFCs discuss on-the-wire protocols and such, and not how messages
> are stored. I don't think e.g. maildir format is described by an RFC?
Aha! So Content-Length: is one of those headers that gets added at "final
delivery" time. Nobody said that before! That suggests it should behave
like Delivery-Date: and Envelope-To: and get removed from messages on
input.
> Hence "line endings" is an abstract thing, it just counts whatever bytes
> are in the body.
Sure, if we are not talking about messages in general, then it's
definable what the size of the body is.
> > Messing with messages isn't really an MTA thing. Whatever the
>
> Then the from_hack should be removed (*), as that is a perfect example of
> messing with the (body of) messages!
Absolutely! It is totally *ridiculous* that MTAs have to be bent to do
this. Whoever started using "From " as a message separator deserves some
kind of everlasting torture...
> The MUA can't, as it can't determine for sure where the next message
> begins (if from_hack is turned off).
Sorry, I was thinking of this header as something in transmission, and
so I thought the *sending* MUA could add it.
> : configurable header insertion/removal support can be used to
> : support the Content-Length field, by adding the following
> : generic attributes to the local transport:
> :
> : remove_header="Content-Length",
> : append_header="Content-Length: $body_size"
... which can be done in Exim too, of course (except it's called
$message_body_size).
> Here's something I found while dredging the net for content-length.
> I've included it to show I can relate to your POV :-) It's from
> http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/content-length.html
> which goes on in more depth. In fact, it's almost convinced me :-)
Well, I must confess to feeling worried about relying on a count like
this. I rather agree with
> : This latter format is non-portable, easily-corruptible,
MBX format seems to me to be better, and Exim does support it.
You might like to know that I have on my work list an item to think
about mailbox formats, because somebody else wants MMDF format - where
the separator lines are ^A^A^A^A. Rather than hack in another set of
special options (though you can put the ^A^A^A^A into "prefix", you
can't set up an aaaa_hack) I wondered if I could do something more
generalized for defining separators and "hacks". For a start, I think
modern MUAs don't actually need *every* line beginning with "From " to
be quoted - only those that really look like separators, with the date
and time, etc. So if I can be more cunning with that, very few "From"s
will actually ever need to be quoted.
But I'm busy with other things at the moment.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
