rc>     Why would you _want_ to search backwards past the SEEN+BY lines
 rc> anyway? Anything before that is pretty much guaranteed to be user text, or
 rc> an origin line, or tearline, which is part of the message body anyway.
 rc> Just look for the first CR before the SEEN+BYs.

I want to search back past the SEENBY to find the tearline and 
origin line in order to strip them out before sticking them 
into my messagebase.

 rc>     The way I do it is to use a "circular buffer" and
just read in chunks
 rc> of PKT, and write out chunks of messagebase. If it hits a line with
 rc> "SEEN+BY" on it, then it removes that line. It continues
until it finds a
 rc> terminating null. It does not have to seek through the message twice (once
 rc> to find null & SEEN+BYs, once to write the actual body), and this speeds
 rc> up things considerably.

 rc>     Of course this means that _any_ occurrence of
"SEEN+BY" in the message
 rc> will be stripped, regardless of whether it's control info or text. This is
 
Exactly. 
 
 rc> an import only tosser, BTW.
 
And if it was a full-fledged tosser, it is important to know 
which SEENBYs were control lines, and which ones were entered
by the user (most likely after quoting something).

 PE>> Yeah, this is the big problem.  Mail readers should be stripping
 PE>> the Origin and tear lines completely, the same way they strip
 PE>> the INTL line.  Failure to do so means that people keep shipping
 PE>> these control lines around with their messages.

 rc>     Can you suggest how I will find the return address of an echomail
 rc> message without an origin line? It's not possible.

That is correct, the tosser needs to *EXTRACT* some information
out of the Origin line, and store it in a similar place to where
it stores the information that it *EXTRACTED* from the INTL line.
No user ever sees the INTL kludge by default, nor should they
see the origin line.  It is not part of the user-text.

 rc>     Don't say ^aMSGID.

Only dickheads say that, and Mark Kimes doesn't pick up this echo.

 rc>     Personally I think they look silly, considering they put a lovely blue
 rc> bar right across the screen in GoldED. But it's my fault for viewing
 rc> kludges, eh? (-:

Yep, no different from complaining about the INTL kludge.  If
you wish to read control lines for debugging purposes, that's
up to you, but I was talking about a user who wants to read
messages on cooking etc.  BFN.  Paul.
@EOT:

--- Mksmsg