7.3.1.5 MMDF
-
A subclass of Mailbox for mailboxes in MMDF format. Parameter
factory is a callable object that accepts a file-like message
representation (which behaves as if opened in binary mode) and returns a custom
representation. If factory is
None
, MMDFMessage is used as the default message representation. If create isTrue
, the mailbox is created if it does not exist.
MMDF is a single-file mailbox format invented for the Multichannel Memorandum Distribution Facility, a mail transfer agent. Each message is in the same form as an mbox message but is bracketed before and after by lines containing four Control-A ("\001") characters. As with the mbox format, the beginning of each message is indicated by a line whose first five characters are "From ", but additional occurrences of "From " are not transformed to ">From " when storing messages because the extra message separator lines prevent mistaking such occurrences for the starts of subsequent messages.
Some Mailbox methods implemented by MMDF deserve special remarks:
- Using the file after calling flush() or close() on the MMDF instance may yield unpredictable results or raise an exception.
- Three locking mechanisms are used--dot locking and, if available, the flock() and lockf() system calls.
See Also:
- A specification of MMDF format from the documentation of tin, a newsreader.
- A Wikipedia article describing the Multichannel Memorandum Distribution Facility.
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