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Aucbvax.4787 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people Thu Oct 29 10:03:07 1981 mail systems standards >From JWALKER@BBNA Thu Oct 29 09:14:08 1981 The following message is typical of many that have been arriving lately via the Editor-People mailing list. At least, I can only guess from the contents that they are arriving via editor-people. They lack any To field, indicating that they have been composed either in an editor by someone who does not know about message format standards or by a quite ersatz message system. In addition to lacking a To field, they lack the "header" for the Text field (which is a blank line).

29-Oct-81 12:09:11-EST,411;000000000001 Mail-from: SU-SCORE Received-Date: 29-Oct-81 1209-EST Mail-from: ARPANET site UCB-C70 rcvd at 29-Oct-81 0853-PST Date: 28 Oct 1981 21:30:36-PST From: decvax!utzoo!xxxxx at Berkeley Re: Alto User's Handbook Some of us who ARE interested to know that this document is now cleared for release would ALSO be interested in having a slightly more detailed mailing address than "Sara Dake at Xerox-PARC".

I protest this form of message being sent to a mailing list on the ARPAnet. At least some message systems that parse messages according to the usual standards can't present this message in a reasonable fashion. The "text" field gets displayed in the middle of the headers (because it is parsed as "unrecognized other field", whose print position happens to be in the middle). I can't use my mail reader to search for messages of this kind -- with no To: field and no Subj: field, there isn't a whole lot available to search for. The only real tip-off is the presence of ! in the From: field.

I hope that whoever is responsible for the software (if it is a message system that creates these messages) will find time to make the messages sent conform to the standards. (If people are just creating the messages and "posting" them via an editor, then they should take a little time out to study the usual conventions involved in a draft message.) It would make things more pleasant for all of us readers.

Thanks. Jan

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