Re: [Evolution] Importing from KMail -- Lost Messages

[Garry Williams <garry zvolve com>]

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 11:44 +0800, Not Zed wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 21:10 -0500, Garry Williams wrote: 
> > On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 17:10 -0500, Rob Matlack wrote:

[snip]

> > but the same symptoms were produced
> > in my case because some of my messages had lines in them that matched
> > this regular expression:
> >
> >     ^[Ff]rom[[:space:]]

[snip]

> Hmm, no, it definitely must be capitalised.  I can't see how you could
> see it matching against non capitalised words.  It uses a memcmp to
> look for the "From " line.

I just did a test and you are right.  My memory is faulty.  It takes a
capitalized ^From to trigger the break.

(By the way, I forgot to mention that the experience I described is with
Evolution 2.0.1 on Mandrake 10.1.)

[snip]

> Ahh well, that isn't berkeley mailbox format then.  That's something
> similar but different.  Rather like sunos' mailbox format which also
> uses/honours the content-length header.
>
> I had no idea mutt did such a thing, it is a pity, since it is a poor
> convention to use.

I also notice a Lines: header in mutt's messages.  I guess it uses both
a belt and suspenders.  :-)

Anyway, it might help to change the import test to also check for a mail
address after the ^From and some number of white spaces.  Of course,
that opens a whole new can of worms because recognizing a syntactically
valid E-mail address is non-trivial -- even if it omits comments.  

The third "field" in a ^From separator is a time stamp.  I've seen a few
different variations of their formats, depending on the client that
created it.  Still, recognizing a time stamp should be easier than an
E-mail address.

Maybe a different change would be to, in the presence of Content-Length:
or Lines:, ignore ^From when it occurs too soon.

-- 
Garry Williams, Zvolve Systems, Inc., +1 770 813-4934
                                Cell: +1 404 353-2983