mem@zinn.MV.COM (Mark E. Mallett) (04/19/88)
Zinn is running smail 2.5; some of our neighbors are not running smail but are using standard (SysV) mailers. I've noticed that ever since smail has been used to receive mail from these neighbors, I can no longer tell when that mail was written. This is because of what smail does to the headers. The older-style mail is generated without a "Date:" field in the header, instead the date and time is stamped on one of the various forms of "from" lines inserted into the header. smail takes out multiple from lines and replaces them with a single one with a composite path gleaned from all "from" lines that it finds. In doing this, it loses all the time stamps: the stamps from systems that the mail passes through, and most importantly the original time stamp put on by the originating mailer. The theory is, I guess, that systems passing the mail should add a "Received:" line, and that the originating system should have supplied a "Date:" line as well. That all sounds fine, except that for every "from" line ripped out, without a corresponding "Received" or "Date" line, information is lost. The biggest loss (to me) is the time of original posting. Having this thrown away is not very nice-- it seems to me that this is a critical part of the information in the header. Yes, I suppose that mailers ought to ensure that a "Date:" entry is generated in mail's header, but there are systems out there that don't do this. If smail is supposed to drop into place and handle existing mail traffic, it ought to be able to do this without losing this important piece of data. Having said all that-- I made some slight modifications to my copy of smail, so that it preserves the date found on the last "From" line and inserts a "Date:" field if one is not present in the header. This was a fairly simple change; smail has code to make sure that fields are present, I just made it so this code is always applied, and made it sensitive to the type of mail being processed (local mail vs mail being routed elsewhere), making particular fields mandatory depending on this context. I am not posting this change because I am not in a position to say that this is absolutely correct behaviour, or to know that it won't break other situations elsewhere in the network. However, I would be interested in hearing comments, such as whether this is a known problem, or whether there is already a fix that I am not aware of. -mm- -- Mark E. Mallett PO Box 4188/ Manchester NH/ 03103 Bus. Phone: 603 645 5069 Home: 603 424 8129 uucp: mem@zinn.MV.COM (...decvax!elrond!zinn!mem or ...sii!zinn!mem) BIX: mmallett
david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) (04/21/88)
This is a good point and would remove some of the guesswork involved
in figuring out what went wrong if/when mail goes awry
What I'd suggest to turn the From_'s and >From_'s into "Comment: From_"
lines (insert "Comment:" in front of the existing line. Possibly also
with the local host name as part of the comment line?). THEN you
use the date from the last >From_ line to fill in missing Date: fields.
The real problem with this is that is more work than most rmail writers
want to devote :-)
--
<---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy <david@ms.uky.edu>
<---- or: {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<---- "... So I walked into the bakery and asked the lady
<---- if she had a bun in the oven ..."sob@watson.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber) (05/03/88)
In article <8995@e.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) writes: > >What I'd suggest to turn the From_'s and >From_'s into "Comment: From_" >lines (insert "Comment:" in front of the existing line. Possibly also >with the local host name as part of the comment line?). THEN you >use the date from the last >From_ line to fill in missing Date: fields. This should really be X-Comment: if anything. It might also be possible to change these into Received: lines. Perhaps the getdate subroutine from netnews could be coaxed into doing this. Yours for RFC-822 compliance, Stan internet: sob@tmc.edu Baylor College of Medicine Olan uucp: {rice,killer,hoptoad}!academ!sob Barber Opinions expressed are only mine.