Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!princeton!udel!rochester!cornell!mailrus!ames!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!dheller
From: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Mail on sunOS 4.0
Message-ID: <4442@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Date: 13 Jul 88 05:56:57 GMT
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu
Reply-To: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Heller)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 46
I just heard some very disturbing news about Mail on sunos 4.0.
Apparently, messages no longer have the string:
From
at the beginning of each message. Instead, the string looks like:
From
I see some major problems with this new format.
1) It's incompatible with any other mailer to date so
now all mail user agents will no longer work until
they are fixed. This includes MH, gnuemacs, elm, mush,
and, of course, the old version of Mail.
2) The "path" that was there, was always correct -- you
could always use that to get the return path easily
if it was incorrect in unavailable in other headers.
3) The date that came after the path was the date that
you received the message. This is rarely the same as
the date the message was sent (via the Date: header).
This isn't as important as the previous two reasons,
but it's a shame that such information is now lost.
I, personally, consider this unforunate because in my
mailer (Mush), you can sort messages by date sent or
date recieved as well as doing other neat things with
the date of a message.
The question is obvious: why?!
Well, clearly, someone at sun was thinking, "well, we have this problem
which can easily be solved by making the header look like _this_!"
Obviously, this person didn't really think about the impact of 1 and 2
mentioned above. I would still like to know what the motivating reason
was to change this format. Of course, I don't know all the facts here --
maybe they compensated for the change by adding new headers into the
list of headers which contain the real return path and the date received.
More importantly, can this "feature" be _disabled_?
Is it a function of sendmail? binmail, or something even newer?
Can I configure out this feature using my sendmail.cf?
Does anyone in the know offer more information on this? I'm happy
to carry on religious arguments about Mail folder formats as well. :-)
Dan Heller