BL> Good thought, but messages from points to their boss don't have
 BL> "SEEN-BY". They do have a #1FMPT line, though, so they can't
 BL> type "AREA:" in the first line.

 FM> Not necessarily. I see nowhere that it says that ^aFMPT must
 FM> occur before the user text. I see nowhere that says that any ^a
 FM> line has to be in a particular spot.

  The way the FTS specs are written, hardly *anything* is compulsory.
Everything is optional as long as it works, and in that case all you
can work on is averages. It is *possible* that someone will put #1FMPT
in the middle of text although it *has* to be at the begiining of a
"physical" line (whatever that means); it is possible that a point may
not send his point number, it is possible that someone will send
"SEENBY" lines starting halfway through a text line, and if you can
believe Paul, even things defined precisely like the 20-byte date
field can be 19. 

  This is the charm of Fido. You have to design your reader to accept
any old shit at all, in any order, and the inevitable consequence of
that is that you cannot define text by any means other than
statistical, on average.

  So... it is true that a point may not have a control line at the
head of his message before user text, but only if he doesn't want mail
to come back to his point address in all cases.

  I like anarchy. In spite of general beliefs, it work very well. If
you fuck-up-you-don't-get-mail sets the floor level. SOT/EOT is just
bullshit.

  Your real problem is designing a reader is to decide *what* to strip
from user text. You are the only one who knows where user text begins
and ends. BlueWave uses translation characters to avoid Tearline and
Origin line conflicts and this seems to be the most sensible approach
to me. My final rep2pkt will add a space at the head of all netmnail
messages and translate: #0, #1, "---", " * " and
"AREA:" at the start
of lines, and "SEENBY:" wherever it appears, to whatever I think is
appropriate (if only to stop someone else's mailer destroying my
messages in a random way).

  My thought so far is to substitute "!" in all cases for the least
damaging character "!", "!", "!--, "!"
"AREA!" and "SEEN!BY:"  

  Paul keeps telling us that PQWK isn't worth a shit, and I agree with
him.

Regards,
Bob

___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
@EOT:

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