Bug#438980: messages always end in \n\n

[Dan Jacobson]

Package: exim4-daemon-light
Version: 4.67-8
Severity: wishlist
File: /usr/sbin/exim4

I challenge you to send yourself a mail which upon reciept doesn't end in
\n  \n
according to od(1) -c.

That's right, no matter how you send the mail, even
$ echo -n yyy|mutt me
it will still end with \n in
/var/spool/exim4/input/*-D
which is OK. But what bugs me is in
~/.procmail/backup/bla #or wherever you intercept it
or whatever file you save it in with your favorite
mail reader, it will end in \n\n.

Let's examine a slice of /var/mail/jidanni, at the boundary of two mails.

!Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:44:41 +0800
!
!xxx
!
!From jidanni at jidanni.org Tue Aug 21 15:46:28 2007

Now change all those boundaries to

!Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:44:41 +0800
!
!xxx
!From jidanni at jidanni.org Tue Aug 21 15:46:28 2007

Now use your favorite mail reader. Same number of messages. In gnus
one can even see that the \n\n is now \n. However each mail reader's
save function still saves them as \n\n. So maybe long ago everybody
aggreed to always have two newlines for 'safety'... so I give up.
Never mind.

The only thing I see in the manual is "All messages transmitted over
SMTP must end with a newline, so Exim supplies one if it is missing."