R. Clayton (rclayton@monmouth.edu)
Fri, 9 Jun 2000 12:17:24 -0400 (EDT)
Are we too consider the text-line after "From " as the mailbox name (VM) or
can that name change?
Everything after the "From " should be considered a text-line with no further
interpretation.
do we assume the mailbox is be a text file?
This is a delicate question. I certainly expect to see your code do some
sanity checks on the mailbox to make sure the contents look somewhat like
mailbox should. However, many things can go wrong in a mailbox, and I don't
want you to spend all your time and effort on error checking.
Probably the best thing to do is start off by assuming the mailbox is properly
formatted. Once you get your code working, if you have the time and the
inclination, you can go back and consider the various likely ways in which a
mailbox can be misformatted and write some defensive code to deal with those
cases.
Are we supposed to get access to a real mailbox?
Ah, that's a problem with this project. There are lots of mailbox formats out
there. Because this is a data structures course and not a file formats course,
I didn't think it was justified having you spend time and effort on puzzling
out your local mailbox format, so I defined a simple-minded format for the
project.
While I would encourage you to explore other mailbox formats if you're
interested, I would also remind you that you might be better served by
exploring various data structures and STL components instead.
Also, if you're on a system that uses bsd mailbox format, you should note that
the mailbox format used in the project is a simplified version. Even if your
program works on the example mailbox, I wouldn't expect it to work on a real
bsd mailbox (because, for example, the project mailbox format doesn't include
folded header lines, which are usually found in real bsd mailboxes; see RFC
822 for more details).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Fri Aug 11 2000 - 15:25:05 EDT