On Lu, 10 mar 14, 21:49:55, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 10:45:36PM +0200, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> > 
> > Thanks, that confirms my understanding. Wouldn't it however make sense 
> > to have this configurable? How many delivery agents actually need that 
> > in 2014?
> 
> In addition to serving as the mbox delimiter, the "From " line also
> records the envelope sender and message arrival time.  It has been
> part of the local delivery interface for a long time.  So in 2014
> I would expect things that have worked for 30+ years to continue
> to work.

Except that tools complain if Maildir messages begin with a 'From ' line 
and all that information is (already) present in the headers.
 
> If you have an LDA that needs to run as the user (most don't these
> days) and does not support "From ", you'll need to strip it out
> for now.

Not exactly, it's just that I don't see the need to run yet another 
command as root. Besides, as far as I can tell, by using pipe(8) instead 
of local(8) I loose aliases processing. Or were you referring to 
something else?

> The local delivery agent does not currently have a configuration
> option to not prepend "From " when piping mail to commands.
> 
> There are multiple command contexts:
> 
>       - mailbox_command
>       - mailbox_command_maps
>       - "|cmd" in a .forward file
>       - "|cmd" on the right side of an alias
> 
> If there were a parameter to suppress "From ", which of these would
> you expect it to apply to?  Recall that not prepending "From " is
> likely to cause problems with commands that are not prepared for
> this.

All of them, of course and to prevent breakage the default should keep 
the current behaviour. Besides, it's not like local(8) is completely 
unaware of Maildir-style messages, it would "just" needs to be 
programmed to do it *also* for deliveries to external commands, on 
request.

I'm aware I'd probably have much more success with a patch attached, but 
unfortunately I'm not a programmer :)

> On the whole, the feature is, I think, dubious.  It is better for
> all commands to receive the message in a standard form, and act
> accordingly.  Therefore, the problem is I think in the LDA that
> no longer supports "From ", it needs to be configurable to allow
> "From ".

It does support it, as in: it doesn't strip it *anymore*, I have to use 
additional tools for that. And if external commands don't need but one 
standard format why does pipe(8) have all those nice *optional* 
processing flags? :)

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)
http://nuvreauspam.ro/gpg-transition.txt

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