[Mimedefang] Mbox Format From Separator Origin
David F. Skoll
dfs at roaringpenguin.com
Tue Dec 9 11:09:32 EST 2008
Kevin A. McGrail wrote:
> However, what's the origin of the From separator to begin with?
Ancient UNIX tradition? From_ is an evil ugly hack that unfortunately
has persisted.
> My belief is that it is the local delivery system, for example
> procmail, that generates it.
It is, usually.
> How can I generate one from MD or, more towards my goal. The leading
> question in this is that some emails seem to get a From line that is
> generated with local user information, and others get it with more
> email-specific sender information. I'm trying to figure out if the lack
> of email-specific From information would indicate spam. However, a
> quick peruse of my own corpora and quarantined email doesn't help much.
The From_ line is typically:
From $Sender Wkday Mon Day HH:MM:SS YYYY
For example:
From bob at example.com Tue Jan 1 00:35:53 2008
The stupidly-formatted date again suggests the ancient origin of the
line...
All you need to do is generate a From_ line (using POSIX::strftime or
the like to format the date) and then append INPUTMSG to your mbox
file.
Regards,
David.
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