Howard: > As far as I know, the terminating dot is never transmitted. It _is_, and that's part of the mail and POP3 RFCs. The mail (receiving) agents rely and depend on it. Which is why the send agent mut never send such a dot-line in a mail body, and has to transform occurring single dots on an otherwise empty line into two dots.
The receiving client _may_ optionally re-translate such a two-dot line into a single-dot line. I dont't know whymost of the *nix clients do that: This implies that thexy then have to suppress the dot-line, end-of-mailitem marker - which in turn creates unnecessary, unneeded additional code bloat with further processing mails (in folders, threds etc.); must be a quite old bad habit, and may have been one of the reasons for that cumbersome "forking" of *.txt and *.wrk files for each and every mail item in *nix inboxes. (Astonishingly enough, Net$rape's mailer behaves rather well in tha respect.) The "raw" mail item always starts with a "+Ok ...(something)..." line (where optinally, and ideally "something" is "xxxxx Octets" but that's not always implemented. And what you get in the download stream is the header lines with a "From:" line, _not_ a line strating with "From..." (sans colon); and at least one, sometimes a long suite of "Received from..." lines. That _added_ "From (no colon)" line as a mail item start marker is a real nuisance. // Heimo Claasen // <hammer at revobild dot net> // Brussels 2002-02-06 The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.revobild.net To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
