Error in mail list MBOX file format

[Richard Gaskin]

Alejandro Tejada wrote:

> The software that is storing the mail from this list,
> made two parsing errors in the mbox file.
>
> Download the file from:
> http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2011-December.txt.gz
>
> The software failed to mark two instances where the word "From"
> appears at the beginning of a line:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
>
> "mboxo and mboxrd locate the message start by scanning for From lines
> that are typically found in the e-mail message header.
> If a "From " string occurs at the beginning of a line in either the headers
> or the body of a message (unlikely for the former for correctly formatted
> messages, but likely for the latter), the e-mail message must be modified
> before the message is stored in an mbox mailbox file or the line will be
> taken as a message boundary. This is typically done by prepending
> a greater-than sign:"

Good find.

Given that RunRev uses what seems like standard list management 
software, I'm not sure how this happened.

But it does indeed happen, more than a dozen times in the file you noted 
(mostly in quoted messages).

This anomaly makes it difficult if not impossible to reliably parse the 
archives, so I'm cc'ing support at RunRev here to see if there may be a 
flag or other simple option to turn on the normal archive format.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv