Re: combining /var/mail files

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen%sdaoden.eu@localhost>]

Rhialto wrote in <20180824224701.GJ5616%falu.nl@localhost>:
 |On Fri 24 Aug 2018 at 19:11:56 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> But for now we unfortunately only use the most basic and only
 |> truly portable form of the traditional "From " quoting mechanism,
 |> and prepend a ">" to any "^From " that happens to exist inside
 |> a message body.
 |
 |I've seen MIME mail that has the F from /^From / replaced with =46 in
 |quoted-printable encoding. A neat trick. (Although it seemed it was
 |applied a bit more often than strictly necessary.)

This is indeed the common way MIME aware mailers do it.  (Though
we, in the sense of the MLs i am subscribed to/track, had a trend
to encode anything in base64 some time ago.)

About strictly necessary, well, the POSIX standard and many simple
tools, including "all" traditional BSD Mail / Unix mail go for the
plain "^From " sequence, and even though RFC 4155 is much more
specific about the "From_" line content, and all MTAs i have seen
honour this, i think it is for the better to create message
entries which the old tools and simple shell and awk scripts
cannot get wrong, and this is what we do.  (I can only speak for
my little thing here.)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)