Postfix/Dovecot/Procmail/Maildir

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 11:13, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 10:57:31AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > > Sadly, not so. What character to you see at the the front of this next line?
> > > >From is used as the delimiter in mbox.
> > 
> > There is a blank line past the end of the previous messge; the current
> > message starts with
> > From
> 
> Clearly it got mangled at some step along the way, because look in the
> quoted lines above -- there's an extra >.

If you include something that matches the delimiter sequence in the
body of a message, anything writing to mbox format must add
the > so it isn't interpreted as a delimiter there.  If something
did this to a real message boundary it is broken.

> > Text has always been subject to various transformations by email
> > transports.  That's one of them. If you need to avoid transformations
> > there have been various means of encoding available for nearly as
> > many years as email has existed.
> 
> This isn't encoding; it's mangling. And it should be stopped. And stopping
> using mbox is the way to stop it.

No, >From is not what I meant by encoding. If you need to prevent
transformations by MTA's you should use an encoding that preserves
the exact binary of the original.  Uuencode was used for this
before base64 and Mime wrappers were added to the email standards.
You can stop using mbox yourself, but email is about exchanging
with others and it is not wise to depend on non-standard changes
to things that you don't control.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com