"Frank J. Wancho" <WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA> (02/12/85)
The digests originating from Rutgers use a program to generate them. The program produces a line of 70 hyphens as the Topic Separator, and a line of 30 dashes as the Message Separator. Each Separator includes a blank line before and after the line of hyphens. As it processes each message to be encapsulated, it removes any trailing lines of hyphens. BABYL's UnDigestify command takes the first occurrance of a line of 65 to 85 hyphens as the Topic Separator and automatically flushes any immediately preceding blank lines. The remainder of the message is assumed to be a collection of one or more encapsulated messages separated by a line of 27 to 33 hyphens. Blank lines following the separator are also removed in the process. Other trailing blank lines that occurred before the Message Separator in the resulting messages are discarded as an inherent part of the normal BABYL message processing. --Frank
Gail Zacharias <GZ@mit-mc.ARPA> (02/12/85)
A minor correction to Frank's description: Babyl's UnDigestify command assumes that the encapsulated messages are separated by a blank line followed by a line of 27-33 dashes. The reason for the blank line is to allow one of the most common in-text use of dash sequences, which is to underline portions of the text. --------- Note that this underlining usage is one example of a situation where the user would indeed object to the mail system changing the exact number of dashes or inserting spaces or other characters in front of the dashes. I have to agree that the most important thing is to have the fact of encapsulation noted somewhere in the message, like in the header. If the sender can communicate the encapsulation method to the recipient, the actual method used is less of an issue. It should be up to the sender to decide whether to make the EB unique by varying the EB or munging the messages.