[Evolution] Dealing with broken mailers

[Richard Zach <zach math berkeley edu>]

I've recently suggested a couple of enhancements for Evolution to better
deal with messages sent by "broken" (ie, non-standards-compliant) mail
user agents. To wit, in
<http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1751>  I pointed out the
nasty habit of some mailers (in particular, Eudora!) to generate From
headers of the form "From: <address> (by way of <resender-address>)" for
resent messages, which Evolution does not display in their entirety, and
in <http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1688> suggested that
Evolution should deal gracefully with non-standard back-reference
prefixes (e.g., "RE:", "Re(2):", "AW:").

It seems neither of these will be addressed. I don't care too much about
these particular issues, however, the rationale given seems to me to be
wrongheaded. The rationale is this: If it's fixed in Evolution, it will
encourage other mailers to keep on being broken.  I'd agree that working
around or accomodating messages generated by broken mailers should not
be a priority (at least right now, pre-1.0).  To suggest, however, that
intentionally making Evolution not deal in an optimal way with messages
generated by Eudora (on the suggestion that to do so would encourage
Eudora to keep on generating broken headers) is just to shoot yourself
in the foot. Even if Evolution could have that kind of effect of making
other software standards-compliant--which I don't think it will--it
leaves the problem of older versions of broken mailers, which certainly
won't be retroactively fixed.

In my opinion, optimal interoperability and compatibility with existing,
if broken, MUAs should be a priority, especially if the MUAs in question
are used by (I suspect) millions of people.

-Richard