Re: [Bug-mit-scheme] imail issues with quoted human names

[Taylor R Campbell]

   Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:24:51 -0400
   From: Julie Sussman <address@hidden>

   I certainly agree with you that a clear and well justified decision
   is the best.  But you explained that there isn't a clear standard
   for the format.  I don't have time to learn about this and investigate
   it myself, but if there's any decision that you and Chris think
   is a good one, I am perfectly happy to reformat the lists in my
   .mailrc, as long as they work with both edwin and emacs.

After some brief discussion with Emacs folks and some further tests,
I've concluded that both GNU Emacs and Edwin are broken.  GNU Emacs's
implementation doesn't match its documentation, and its mailrc syntax
doesn't even make sense.  Edwin has the deficiency you observed.  I
can find no clear documentation on the mailrc syntax used by mail(1),
whose reference manual is vague, and which empirically appears just to
strip quotation marks altogether and tokenize by spaces -- i.e., it
looks like the originator of the format is broken, too.

So, I'd rather do away with the mailrc file altogether, or at least
use something else.  Would you mind using a different file with a
different format altogether, provided that both GNU Emacs and Edwin
can interpret it identically?