[Patches] Unix Mailboxes don't work quite right.

John Viega viega@list.org
Sun, 18 Jun 2000 09:49:14 -0700


On Sun, Jun 18, 2000 at 12:11:56PM +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> John Viega wrote:
> > 
> > The method "_isrealfromline" in mailbox.UnixMailbox doesn't handle some
> > real email messages.  I've noticed this by comparing Python's notion of
> > a Mailbox with that of real mailers.  In this particular case, one of my
> > real mailboxes has several messages without a time zone offset included,
> > and Python doesn't treat those from lines as the start of a message.
> 
> Those messages are likely to be spam :-)

They're not.  It was an outgoing mailbox, and apparently it depends on
which mailer I used to send a message.

> Why not fix the RE to also match the messages you are seeing 
> your mail box file instead of removing the check completely ?

Because every sequence of "\nFrom " starts a new message as far as
every mailer I've ever seen is concerned.  If a line of text actually
started with "From", then it is supposed to be escaped with a ">" so
as to avoid confusing it with a from line.

John