Re: MIME disposition

From: Daniel Stenberg <Daniel.Stenberg_at_sth.frontec.se_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 08:09:30 +0200 (MET DST)
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9904230800300.16821-100000_at_metal.sth.frontec.se>

On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, John Finlay wrote:

> It's been my experience during some limited testing that the current
> hypermail 2a18 doesn't correctly parse mail files that include MIME
> headers. For example, I used 4 mailfiles each containing 800 to 1000
> messages as a test . The results varied widely but I found that the
> resulting archives contained between 130 and 400 messages. This seems
> like a rather substantial loss.

It does indeed. Although it is likely to be because of just one or a few bugs that cause many mails to vanish.

> Looking at the code it seems that messages without a message id are
> tossed. Duplicates are also discarded. Other than that I don't see why
> the other messages have been discarded. Any ideas?

No...

> While browsing the code, I noticed that the parsemail function (which
> appears to be renamed from loadheaders in previous releases) has grown
> substantially (almost 1000 lines and 10 levels of indentation is some
> spots) from 1.02 (which is the last release I'm intimately familiar
> with).

It has. I can't say I'm proud of what it has turned into. Can I blame on little time? ;-)

> I find it almost impossible to understand. Consequently, I plan to
> rewrite parsemail for correctness and readability and to make future
> enhancement easier. At the same time I will add in the performance
> improvements, etc. that I developed for the 1.02 release.

I'd love to see that happening! We have a lot to gain by cleaning up that function since that is the very heart of the email parsing in hypermail.

I don't want to be rude or anything, but if you "pass the test" of doing good improvements you could get write access to the CVS server and apply your changes directly into the main sources. Until then I prefer getting patches!

> One the items that local users have asked for is a kill capability to
> allow killing messages from specified senders and to allow killing
> messages not directly addressed to the receiver. This functionality seems
> like it probably is available elsewhere. Has someone a pointer to a
> filter program that can be used before processing by hypermail.

I think this sounds like a perfect job for 'procmail'.

Thanks for getting involved and contributing to the project!

--
             Daniel Stenberg - http://www.fts.frontec.se/~dast
   ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol

Received on Fri 23 Apr 1999 08:08:47 AM GMT