>>>>> "mbn" == Mike Northam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
mbn> I have a correspondent whose 'From' is this:
mbn> From: 11-Feb-1994 0724 -0700 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
...
mbn> BBDB keeps wanting to make this guy's name "Feb", apparently thinking the
mbn> date entry is a name.
As a consultant working within Digital, I've been up against this for
some time - in fact, I exchanged some mail with Jamie about it some
months ago.
**** history and commentary - some suggestions below ****
The source of this bizarre From: line is that VMS mail does not have a
Date: header. This is only one of its many shortcomings. Another is
that by default it does only end-to-end delivery; when you send a
message your mail program connects all the way to each recipients
system and delivers the mail. Needless to say, that didn't scale
well, so some enterprising soul created a store-and-forward backend
for it. Having done so, the delivery time the mail system gave you no
longer told you when the mail was sent, so they added an option to
stuff the origination time of the message into - of all places - the
From: field!
This doesn't seem to bother anyone here, since for some reason I
cannot divine users in Digital do not usually put thier names there
anyway. Instead, they put in cute phrases, commentaries, Bible
quotations, and other uninformative things.
All this really drives BBDB nuts. It is a testament to the
usefullness of BBDB that it can be usefull even amid all this
sillyness.
**** suggestions ****
Working through this fairly thoroughly and discussing it with Jamie,
led to the conclusion that if it was to be fixed it should be fixed
with a change to or a hook in 'mail-extr.el'. It does have a fair
amount of code to recognize other silly non-name things sometimes
found mixed into addresses (it somehow manages to rip out everything
but the month!).
I'm afraid I havn't worked through the details there well enough to
even try a solution out on myself, though.
--
Scott Lawrence DEC - Email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> DTN: 226-6758
home - Email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Phone: 508-287-0017
