Re: Last Call: 'The APPLICATION/MBOX Media-Type' to Proposed Standard

Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

> Umm.. Tony?  I hate to say it, but if there have been several variants used in
> the wild, and the man pages for said variants document different formats,
> that's awfully close to "anecdotally defined" when you're doing a standard.

The claim in Appendix A is that there were no authoritative sources of 
documentation for the mbox formats and otherwise it's "only documented 
in anecdotal form". I'm sorry, but the the definitions ARE there, and 
ARE almost always authoritative for those systems.

This doesn't preclude there being other formats in the wild, nor does it 
preclude there being other tools on those same machines that conflict.

> For example, a Solaris 8 box across the hall says in 'man mail.local':
> ...
> 
> Any doubts that this whole mess is at best anecdotally defined can be dispelled by
> mentioning "Content-Length:" (interestingly enough, not even mentioned in the
> Solaris or Sendmail man pages, although the Sendmail source tree does mention
> that building on Solaris 2.3 or later will turn it on.  Of interest mostly because
> the Content-Length: is so easily broken by later >-stuffing/unstuffing or other
> similar conversion...

Because Solaris 8 is System Vr4-derived, you should look at 'man mail' 
for the definitive definition. You'll find Content-Length: documented there.

	Tony Hansen
	tony@att.com

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