Subject: Re: ?: Pine + Sun Mailtool + Content-Length

From: [email-masked] (Jaakko Salminen - Sun Finland)
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 15:44:09 +0200

Ed,

I guess I was asking for it.. :-) 

Yes, I realize that Content-Length is not a safe header, just like 
sending 8bit characters in email makes some MTAs puke. But 
Content-Length seems to work at least most of the time just fine, 
since other mailers like Elm and Mailtool have some error resilience 
built-in for cases when Content-Length is not correct. Looking at
Elm source code, it is not even overly difficult to code. 

Pine looks really wonderful, but this "feature" makes it unusable
for me. I guess I'll stick with Elm.. At the office I use Mailtool,
but I need a tty-based mailer for dial-in connections.

Jaakko Salminen

(Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not for Sun Microsystems)

On Mon, 5 Dec 1994, Ed Greshko ([email-masked]) wrote:

>
>On Mon, 5 Dec 1994, Jaakko Salminen - Sun Finland wrote:
>
>> Sun Mailtool uses the Content-Length header line to determine 
>> the actual lenght of an email. This is particularly useful when
>> sending a mailfolder or email messages as an attachment, because
>> they have lines beginning with From: that are really just
>> part of the message, not the beginning of another.
>> 
>> Pine doesn't seem to use the Content-Length line, it breaks 
>> messages with other messages as attachments to separate messages.
>> Have I missed something obvious or is this an incompatibility
>> between Sun Mailtool and Pine?
>> 
>> RTFMs and pointers are welcome.
>
>	I seem to have misplaced it....but Mark Crispin had an excellent
>piece on "horrors of Content-Length".
>
>	Bottom line, it is not a reliable header.  Much can happen to a
>message as it passes between MTAs that can have an effect on the
>actual length of a message.  Can you imagine what would happen is an
>MTA converted CR into CR+LF and the Content-Length remained unchanged?
>The message:
>
>	...make sure you turn the power off
>
>may be displayed instead of what was actually received.
>
>	...make sure you turn the power off and then on after changing the
>	switch setting.  Failure to do so.....
>
>	Just like there are lots of good reasons that pine doesn't use
>uuencode there are other good reasons why it doesn't use Content-Length:
>
>	The *real* question you should be asking is...."Why does SUN
>insist on using Content-Length: headers?
>
>
>						Ed

---

From: Ed Greshko <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 21:56:27 -0800 (GMT)

> but I need a tty-based mailer for dial-in connections.

	Actually, if you "fix" your final delivery process such that
messages which contain lines in the body that start with "From " are
escaped to read ">From " you will be able to use pine and that other
UA I can't get my fingers to type.  :-) 

	I don't use any of Sun's mail programs....so I'm not familiar
with them.  However, it has been suggested that you may want to 
replace Sun's /bin/mail program with the delivery program "sendit"
that can be found on ftp.cac.washington.edu.  I'm not sure....but
you may even be able to get away with changing the mailer flags in
your sendmail.cf file and tell Suns's /bin/mail to do the right thing.

					Ed

Edward M. Greshko                       Technical Manager, Electronic Commerce
                                        Control Data Asia/Pacific Region
Voice: +886-2-715-2222 x287             6/F, 131 Nanking East Road, Section 3
FAX  : +886-2-712-9197                  Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C

---

From: Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 14:15:18 -0800 (PST)

On Mon, 5 Dec 1994, Ed Greshko wrote:

>...
>...

Sendit is just the delivery program we use on many systems at the Univ. 
of Washington.  You may be better off getting one of the more well-known 
programs which has been tuned for portability.  Procmail and deliver are 
two that come to mind.

Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Washington, Seattle