[net.mail] Date in a V7 mail From line?

lee@west44.UUCP (Lee McLoughlin) (03/12/84)

I was hoping someone could give me a  definitive  answer  to  the
following:-  What  is  the  format  of the date field in a "Bell"
standard mail header.

I'm talking about the mailer with  all  the  "From"  and  ">From"
lines.   Of late I've been getting in mail which has the timezone
in the From line which confuses some new mail software.

Our V7 mailer calls ctime to generate  a  26  (inc'  newline  and
null) char string which is the date in GMT but without a "GMT" in
the string itself.  Is it permissable to have a timezone field?
-- 
"The wizard of OS"	Lee McLoughlin	....!ukc!root44!west44!lee
					....!ukc!lmcl

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (03/13/84)

Anyone whose software assumes that there is some sort of "standard"
format for the date in a "From " header is in for trouble.  The V7
mailer and most of its descendants generate something which is more
or less predictable, but there are other mailers in use that generate
total weirdness in there.  Making assumptions about the format of the
date is unwise.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry

fair@dual.UUCP (Erik E. Fair) (03/20/84)

If you want to keep standard, ctime(3) returns a 26 character, null terminated
string as in the following example:

	Tue Mar 20 12:32:40 1984

This is the same on V7, System III, System V (that's what we're running), and
all of the 4BSD systems. ANYONE who is putting timezone into ctime(3) output
is violating the standard, and he/she/it will break a LOT of software.

The `From' line in UNIX Mail also has a standard format that is of the form:

	From fair Tue Mar 20 12:38:16 1984

ARPAnauts will note with disgust that there is NOT a colon after the field
identifier. Well, sorry guys, this is the way we doit in UNIX Land. The
return address is the second field in the line, and it is delimited by
one space on either side. The rest of the line is a date in ctime(3) format.

Now, by way of example, a story:

	Once upon a time some hackers at Duke University noticed that ctime(3)
produces two spaces between the Month and the day of the month when the day of
the month was less than 10 (e.g. `Mar  3'). They decided this was ugly. They
changed it to produce one space. When the first of the month rolled around,
loud screams of anguish were heard from all over bangland. No one could read
Mail from `duke'! It parsed all wrong. Insofar as I am aware, `duke' did the
sensible thing, and changed back.

Moral: Leave it the HELL alone!

	Erik E. Fair

	dual!fair@Berkeley.ARPA
	{ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!fair
	Dual Systems Corporation, Berkeley, California