Re: Lost new mail

Yngvar Folling (yngvar.folling@login.eunet.no)
Mon, 3 Jun 1996 06:36:28 +0200 (MET DST)

In article <31ABF034.33DB@ritz.mordor.com>, JC <w2jc@ritz.mordor.com> wrote:

> > Ah, those. I've become very careful about sending commands to uqwk. Is
>
> These are not due to _commands_ sent to uqwk; they are do to the way
> uqwk splits messages when it finds From at the start of a new line after
> a blank line (and perhaps some other conditions which I've not been able
> to precisely detect).

Sorry if I misunderstood. I've noticed that whenever I send commands to
uqwk, and have another mail message after the uqwk command message, the
result seems to be completely unpredictable. Sometimes the message gets
an enormous amount of garbage at the end, which sounded like what you
described. All I've been able to do is to remember that if I write a
new mail message after a command message to uqwk, remember to go in and
edit the reply packet afterwards, to move the uqwk commands to the end.

> > there any chance that it'll be upgraded?
>
> At this point, I would say about as much chance as a snowball in hell!
>
> Hate to say that, because the author of uqwk USED to be very helpful
> (almost as much as Chin), but over a year ago he adamantly REFUSED to
> make any changes to uqwk to fix this From problem -- insisting first it
> was not a fault of uqwk and then that users should not start a new line
> with the word From... dozens of users have asked him to put some code in
> that would fix the problem, but he still seems to be unwilling.

Um, I'm afraid that I do see his point here. I have used uqwk for about
two years now, and have never experienced this problem. Granted, lines
beginning with From get a > in front, but that is a minor problem. As
far as I recall, you suggested that he should check for the @ character
in the line, which would break any message from a local user. That
would be just as big a problem as the one you have, if not for you
personally.

The question is, what are the standards about the format of mail spool
files? And which software has not followed those standards? The mail
transport software on your site, or uqwk? After all, *something* is
different between your and my system, and that is not uqwk.

Anyway, I don't understand what this has to do with the messages growing
so large? The messages are plit up where they should not be, but
doesn't that only result in two messages half the original size? Mind
that I, as I said, have never experienced this problem.

Yngvar