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Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ncr-sd!matt
From: matt@ncr-sd.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Survey on damage by mailers.
Message-ID: <1927@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: Fri, 4-Dec-87 20:31:00 EST
Article-I.D.: ncr-sd.1927
Posted: Fri Dec  4 20:31:00 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 8-Dec-87 06:44:03 EST
References: <408@minya.UUCP> <7754@g.ms.uky.edu> <8991@utzoo.UUCP> <471@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM>
Reply-To: matt@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Matt Costello)
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 30

In article <471@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM> brian@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM (Brian Onn) writes:
>I agree!  I hate those "From " lines and "remote from" lines in mail messages.
>I have been giving serious thought to hacking on smail so that it removes 
>those lines.  As long as we have a domain mailer, I don't care how the mail
>got here. 
>
>Of course this means that all sites that mess with the "From: " line will
>have to refrain from doing this :-).
>
>Anyone have any reasons (besides the obvious one above) as to why I should
>not go ahead and do this?

At least one From_ line is necessary at the beginning of a mail message
for the normal mailbox format.  The first one (without the '>') is used
to denote the start of a mail message in a mailbox file.  This convention
is used by /bin/mail, mailx, elm, etc.  If you are willing to use a
different scheme such as that used by MH then getting rid of the From_
lines might be reasonble.  As it it you'd just be cutting your throat.

I have to agree that there can be too many From_ lines.  The solution is
to let smail (i.e. the message tranport agent) collapse all the From_
lines to a single line.  Smail has supported this from at least version 1.3.
In smail2.5 the function rline() is defined at line 373 of the file
headers.c; this function collapses all the From_ lines into a single
line and also removes redundant host information.

-- 
Matt Costello	
+1 619 485 2926	
		{sdcsvax,cbosgd,pyramid,nosc.ARPA}!ncr-sd!matt