[TUHS] Re: Mailer History -- was Berkeley CSRG Building

Clem Cole wrote in &lt;CAC20D2Nin-yvELys6QHGZjw1otuLegXy3keyg4-E1kd3ZME+KA(a)mail.gmail.com&gt;: |On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 11:44 AM Rich Salz &lt;rich.salz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: | |> I always thought the five control-A's were a failure of imagination |> (never going to send binary?). |> |As always, it's about history and how they got there. What was reasonable |for one group, over time was not for another. | |To be fair, that was Bruce Borden-ism from the Rand Mailer Handler (MH). |Longer before things LIKE Ease/MMDF *et al*., Rand was running UNIX |machines on the ARPANET early on (and UUCP did not yet exist). The mailer |header format needed to be RFC733 in those days. The use of the "UNIX" |headers - was rather limited to a couple of programs in the Fifth and Sixth |Edition. Bruce had replaced the Fifth and Sixth edition "mail" program |(which was both the MUI and MTA combined), with separate programs already |as part of creating this new user interface and mailer agent. Thus, a new |mailbox format was fair game. | |It was not a failure of imagination, binary was not an issue for Bruce - |since it was not allowed in RFC733 at that point. Now, remember that many Depending on what you mean by "at that point" i think here you misremember. (To the contrary 733 and also 822 allow practically anything, it was RFC 2822 from 2001 which then at least says "The NUL character (ASCII value 0) was once allowed, but is no longer for compatibility reasons". Except for NUL (comments) can still as of today contain the now-called obs-NO-WS-CTL defined as obs-NO-WS-CTL = %d1-8 / %d11 / %d12 / %d14-31 / %d127; ; US-ASCII controls except CR, LF, and whitespace) |UNIX folks on the ARPANET had already switched to MH (that's why we |switched to using it at CMU), so MMDF picking Bruce's format was a good |idea (for them). Remember, AT&T Research is not on the ARPANET, so the |mail (local to a single machine in those days) could be in any format |they wanted. |RFC733 (and later 822) headers were not an issue, so the funky "From:" |worked fine. | |As I pointed out, UCB was not on the ARPANET, so when Kurt wrote the UCB |MUI and split out the MTA as delivermail, he kept the V5/V6 mailbox \ |format ( |mbox) from Research. The issue came when people started using the mail |system as a programmatic messaging scheme (*i.e.,* fork: some_program | |mail user) and other programs started to parse the output. More |importantly, getting an ARPANET connection was difficult, so many fewer |sites needed to support the ARPANET (later Internet) header format, whereas |a USENET connection via UUCP was easy. So >>lots<< of people started to |pick up Mail(1) [Kurt's new MUI) and did not use/know about, much less need |to switch over to MH and RFC733/822. | |Thus, the switch from the Research "mbox" format to Borden's scheme started |to become problematic in that if the new utility "knew" about mbox, it had |to be hacked if you were using MH or something that was derived from MH |(like MMDF or PMDF). As a remark, the MBOX format as standardized by POSIX decades ago line beginning with From<space> [one or more header fields; see Commands in mailx (on page 3112)] empty line [zero or more body lines empty line] [line beginning with From<space>...] is pretty clear (the BSD Mail i took maintainership of only did it too laxe, and it took prodding by Dr. Werner Fink of SuSE for me to realize *how* much, in 2019). And even more so the MBOX format as standardized by RFC 4155! Compare to the Unicode people, who advise on looking for and then fully trust the BOM (U+FEFF), which is only 16-bit. (And also, with MIME, which was standardized in its iterated, current version 28 years ago, and RFC 4155 from 2005, one would normally save content-encoded data in the thus unambiguous, non-misinterpretable database that MBOX is; the IETF has not yet iterated RFC 4155, so all the "UTF-8" email extensions do not apply, and 4155 states: "Eight-bit data within the stream MUST be converted to a seven-bit form (using appropriate, standardized encoding) and appropriately tagged (with the correct header fields) before the database is transferred".) --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)