Re: [PATCH] Fix Subject when forwarding message with 2-line From

[Mike Kupfer <mkupfer@alum.berkeley.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > From: Mike Kupfer <mkupfer@alum.berkeley.edu>
> > Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2021 17:49:18 -0800
> > 
> > Hi, is the attached patch to MH-E eligible for emacs-28, or should it go
> > into master?
> 
> I don't use MH-E, so I don't know how severe is the problem.  Can you
> tell?

I think the argument for fixing it now is this: if the user doesn't
notice the problem and fix it before pressing C-c C-c, the attempt to
forward can fail (e.g., get bounced by the mail server) because of the
messed-up headers, and the user might have a hard time figuring out what
happened.

On the other hand, I think 2-line From headers are fairly rare.  I don't
think I've ever hit this bug.  Lester (the person thanked in the
changeset comment) reported seeing it "once in awhile".  It's been on
the MH-E bug list (on SourceForge) since 2012.

> In any case, isn't the fix more than absolutely necessary?  If all you
> want is replace newlines with spaces, why not do just that?  Or what
> am I missing?

If mh-forwarded-letter-subject doesn't eat the whitespaces around the
newline, you can get a Subject line that looks like

  Subject: "Some User"  : 2-line From

It's functional, I suppose, but the ":" is supposed to come immediately
after the name ("Some User" here).

mike