Klarinet Archive - Posting 000476.txt from 1998/12

From: "Mark Charette" <charette@-----.org>
Subj: Re: [kl] Netscape Mail (was: good posting / Mac email editors)
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 07:46:02 -0500

From: John Dablin <johnd@-----.com>
>I'm using Netscape 4.05 on a Sun running Solaris 2, and I find that
>whenever it encounters a blank line followed by a line beginning "From"
>(with a capital F) it thinks it is a start of a new message. What
>puzzles me is that looking into my incoming mail file with a text
editor
>there doesn't seem to be any kind of message delimiter, so that must be
>the only way to identify the start of a message. Why don't other mail
>programs have problems? I've looked at Netscape's web page without any
>luck, maybe it only affects Unix systems?

That's one of the problems with the Netscape mailer. The RFC for mail
defines the line following the first blank line as the start of message,
but there are mailers and mail programs out there that throw spurious
blank lines in the header section. Most of the other mail programs look
at the _next_ line to see if it starts with a mail header keyword, and
ignore the blank line if it does.

Sometimes the Netscape mailer gets so thrown off that it refuses to get
the rest of the mail from a pop server, and the mailbox has to be
manually fixed by someone at the ISP.

Cheers.
----
Mark Charette@-----.org
Webmaster, http://www.sneezy.org/clarinet
All-around good guy and devil-may-care flying fool.
"There can be no freedom without discipline." - Nadia Boulanger

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