Re: [nmh-workers] INCing of email archives

[Ken Hornstein]

> > Once in a while I download email archives of some mailing list
> > and unpack them using "inc -file <archive-file>". But more
> > than once I have seen that inc gets confused and doesn't
> > unpack the whole thing. The cause seems to be a line starting
> > with From in some message body. Ideally inc should look that
> > a "From ..." line is immediately followed by header lines.
> > And if this is not the case, assume it is in the message body.
>
>I thought the trigger was "\n\nFrom: ", and that no more headers
>were needed.

It seems that mbox format was officially standardized in RFC 4155
(although even that RFC acknowledges that there are lot of variations).
I guess the best you can count on is:

>From <unspecified stuff here>

Note no colon (that's a header field).

To make it even more confusing, technically \n\n is NOT part of the
separator because at the beginning of the mbox file you don't have a
blank line.  Every other message in the mbox file IS supposed to have
a blank line followed by a "From ".

--Ken