Re: E-mail for Pilot

[Ken Rossman - NYC SE <Ken.Rossman@East>]

> On Wed, 13 Jan 1999 evoosten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> > The default SunOS and Solaris mailers use the very old-fasioned but
> > highly useful Unix mailboxes.  Even Netscape for Solaris uses only small
> > extensions to the mailboxes.  They are almost compatible.
> 
> Do SunOS and Solaris use the same flavor?

Yes, though the mailbox repository directory (spool directory) is slightly
different in each case (/var/spool/mail by default in the SunOS 4.1.x case,
and /var/mail in the SunOS 5.x -- a.k.a. Solaris 2 -- case).

> I was pretty sure that SunOS doesn't use Content-Length, and Solaris
> does.

That is up to the mail agent, actually.  Some mail agents I have used under
both OS's rely entirely on hunting for the string "<newline>From " as the
beginning-of-message flag, while others rely on a message length field.

To be complete, you'd probably want to implement a combination of both.

> ...If you could do it reliably, it'd be great for people who use that
> format, since they could then sync both ways, but it might be tricky
> determining which format to use on a given system.

If we're talking about the difference between looking for a "From" header
and looking for Content-Length headers, what should *really* be done is to
look for both of them (and check also for consistency -- i.e. after
"Content-Length" characters, you should see a new "From" header).

> (I'm not sure this conduit would support Netscape, since it has its index
> files, and I'm not sure that it would update them if it sees the mbox
> file is newer.  Worth looking into.)

Netscape's index files are pesky, but at least the internal mail file
format is pretty much the same, or at least close enough.

Ken Rossman, NYC SE           212-558-9182  ||  212-558-9329 (FAX)
Sun Microsystems              Email: Ken.Rossman@xxxxxxx
One New York Plaza, 35th Fl.  SUN Internal: http://noho.East/~rossman
New York, NY 10004            INTERNET: http://www.columbia.edu/~rossman
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