On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 01:39:43PM -0400, grarpamp wrote: > >> mutt didn't need that header to operate well in the original folder. > >> In general, can't think of any reason to modify any Maildir message on > >> disk > >> and view this as tainting the msgs with unecessary and un-asked-for mods. > > > > well, they don't really hurt, but may even help mutt and other tools. > > 'Really' hurt or 'may' help is not relevant, and vague. The msg file is being > tampered with on disk when, as far as I know, there is no RFC or other such > non-optionable specification requiring such modification. Though I'm > still searching for one and would like to read it to make sure of this, > I've not found such spec requirement yet.
I wouldn't bother searching any further -- mailbox formats are generally (and IMO wrongly) regarded as outside the scope of RFCs and suchlike. > > Please answer me one question: what kind of crypto/archive system do you > > use that does not understand Maildir in it's whole and what kind of use > > case does it have. > > Unix people commonly store the hashes of every file on disk. They rehash > and compare using various tools at various intervals. When those hashes > change, it may indicate any number of potentially bad things, from security > to apps/hardware gone bad. What happens if you chmod a-w them? I sympathize with the crypto hash change problem, but there are other ways of protecting your files. > >> What else is being surreptitiously modified during mutt operation? > > > Well, I think you should check mutt's codepath yourself if you want to > > know that exactly. That's why it's called open source. > > Open source isn't supposed to change people's files like this unless > required by some specification. This would be like an image or mp3 editor > or Microsoft Office adding metadata to all your such files just because it > wanted to. In the absense of documentation saying 'oh, by the way, we do > this, and here's a way to opt out...', that's generally very taboo with open > source and shouldn't have to be checked for. Huh? "Open source" shouldn't do it? Either it's good practice or it's bad practice; whether the source code is freely available or not seems immaterial to me. I certainly agree that it should be documented, however. Paul. -- Paul Hoffman <nkui...@nkuitse.com>
