Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP 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