Subject: address book format

From: Laurie Cuthbert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1993 18:44:45 GMT

To my understanding, the only difference between the format 
used by ECS mail and by pine's normal orperation is that the 
order of first name / last name is reversed, and that pine 
uses a comma to separate the last name and first name.

It is likely to become quite common here for users to switch 
between pine and ECS, depending on which machine they 
happened to be: it it would be rather nice if it were 
possible for ECS mail to be able to read the pine format 
and convert the full name to the correct form in the mail 
header.

I realise that is possible to use the ECS format in pine, 
but by default (following the addressbook menu prompts) the 
reveral and comma are included - and I suspect that many of 
our users would get things wrong if they were told to ignore 
the prompts and always use first_name last_name.

I also accept that it is very easy to convert between 
formats, but given the closeness of the formats a 100% 
compatibility seems a good idea.

Perhaps something for the wish list for ECS.

Regards

Laurie Cuthbert

---

From: Steve Hole <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 12:16:07 -0700

On Fri, 10 Dec 1993 11:44:45 -0700 Laurie Cuthbert wrote:

> From: Laurie Cuthbert
> Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1993 11:44:45 -0700
> Subject: address book format
> To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> 

Really, this is a weakness in ECSMail Laurie.  ECSMail was very literal
in its interpretation of the "fullname" field of the address book.  If 
there was a "," embedded in the name, then it would wrap in quotes.   
Beyond that, it would do no processing of the full name. 

We have recently added the functionality to rewrite the fullname 
field into something that is RFC822 compliant.   If the fullname 
field contains a "," then we assume that it is in the form:

  surname, firstname

and paste it into the address field as:

  firstname surname

If any non-RFC822 compliant characters show up in the fullname field, 
then we automatically wrap the fullname in "".   

Please note that the address book format used by ECSMail will change
in the next version of ECSMail.   The format that we use now is far to
restricting in terms of content and functionality to continue with.  
We will provide a utility to convert the contents of your old address
book to the new form.   

We will make evey effort to try to maintain compatibility with Pine in 
this.   As the new format will be based on support for IMSP, we should
be able to do this.  

Cheers.

--
Steve Hole  		        ECS Technical Manager
ISA Corporation			mail:  [email-masked]
Suite 835, 10040 - 104 St.      phone: (403) 420-8081
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada       fax:   (403) 420-8037
T5J 0Z2