* On 22 Mar 2013, Chris Green wrote: > What should an MTA do if there *isn't* a blank line at the end of > the current mbox where it is going to append a new message? It > seems to me that what the Python libraries do guarantees that there > will always be a blank line before the 'From ' line, if there's one > already then it doesn't matter too much.
I don't want to butt heads with Python library people, but I would argue that the Python library's approach is backwards. This has historically been mildly problematic with Mailman archives, for example, which begin with a blank line instead of with 'From ', and are unreadable without modification using some mail applications. (Mutt was patched to accomodate this quirk only relatively recently.) > Mutt itself *doesn't* put a blank line there, if you S[ave] or > C[opy] messages to a new mbox the messages have no blank lines > before the 'From '. Mutt instead writes Lines: and Content-Length: headers, which are a good alternative to using '\n\nFrom ' as a message delimiter. If you have Lines: and/or Content-Length: in your delivery message, your LDA/filter does not need to place a blank line at all. But unless you're adding those yourself, you can't depend on having them. It is therefore best to append a blank line to messages during local delivery. -- David Champion • d...@bikeshed.us
