Re: [Nmh-workers] Understanding nmh (aka. What's the goal)

[Joel Uckelman]

Thus spake Robert Elz:
>     Date:        Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:39:37 -0800
>     From:        Jon Steinhart <address@hidden>
>     Message-ID:  <address@hidden>
> 
>   | A big thing that someone could do to help me with this would be to
>   | collect all of the various grammar into a single document.
> 
> Aside from intellectual curiosity, no, I don't think that's either
> needed or useful.   We know we can never have everything, as there's
> sure to be something new appearing tomorrow - the right solution is
> to deal with  the general principles properly, not to attempt to be
> able to handle every detail (even less so, as half the world's mail
> systems generate improperly formed messages, if we think we know what is
> correct, half - or more - the mail we ever see will fail).
> 
> We need to understand the general principles of header fields, and MIME
> separators, etc, and then understand exactly those elements that are
> required for the job that is needed - and simply ignore everything else
> (leave that for someone who needs it, and can understand and add that
> code, or simply ignore it totally if it adds no value for us).

It's probably not necessary to fully implement RFC822 parsing (e.g.,
does anybody use bang paths these days?) but trying to proceed on
"general principles" when you have a well-defined spec in hand is folly.

-- 
J.