From: Matthew J Ghio <mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 93 10:12:48 PDT
To: hfinney@shell.portal.com (Hal Finney)
Subject: Re: Mail delivery question
In-Reply-To: <9310211532.AA05517@jobe.shell.portal.com.shell.portal.com>
Message-ID: <sglg7Lq00awJQWsX5w@andrew.cmu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I was pondering the same question awhile ago.  After poking around in
the system and reading the temporary scratch files that the system
created by the mailer, I noticed that the mail was being preceeded by a
seperate header packet which was not included in the message.  Sending
mail to myself caused the system to create two temporary files in the
process.  One of them was called "SF" and the other was "QF".  I don't
know what the letters stand for, and this is probably just how CMU does
it, other sites may be different.  Anyway, in my test mail to myself,
the SF file contained:

#From |<mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu>|
#To |mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu|
#Auth |26634;andrew.cmu.edu;Matthew J Ghio|

and the QF file contained the actual text of the message plus the
headers that you see.  So the email is actually sent as two seperate
packets of data, the headers you see are just there for looks, the
actual delivery info is hidden behind-the-scenes.  Does anyone else have
any description of "standard" methods of handling internet e-mail?