Re: [Nmh-workers] Thoughts: header/address parsing

[norm]

Lyndon Nerenberg <address@hidden> writes:

>
>On Aug 3, 2014, at 12:01 PM, address@hidden wrote:
>
>> I wondering, if in doing this, you might consider a new nmh command
>that would
>> parse message headers.
>
>And do what with them, exactly?


One example: Get the effective content part of an 'X-Spam-Status" header. (By
"effective" I mean after unraveling line continuations etc) as part of script
that classifies Email. Yes, I know, I could workaround, here, by assuming that
this header and its content almost always, probably always, has a canonical
form, and that the mis-classifications because of the very occasional
occurrence of this canonical form, elsewhere in a file, will not do much harm.

More generally, I believe that, nearly from its very inception, mh/nmh
commands have been too complicated. They do too much, violating the "Do one
thing and do it well" precept. The command I suggested is one tiny step toward
having commands that do RELATIVELY simple things.

    Norman Shapiro