[ILUG] Email headers...

[adam beecher]

Can anyone point me in the direction of plain english resources dealing with
email, particularly email headers and working with them in mailing list
software. Not RFCs please, I've scanned most of the appropriate ones but I'd
prefer to read something aimed at a dimbo like me.

One question that ye may be able to answer is whether case is important.
RFC822 seems to say that it's not, but agents seem to consistently use From,
To, etc, with the first letter in uppercase and subsequent letter lowercase.
Is this the standard or should I strtolower() or strtoupper() when I'm
parsing, just in case? What about languages - is English the standard for
headers? I presume it is, but I've presumed wrong in the past. Also, are
there any considerations I should make for broken headers - i.e. are the
"standard" headers (From, To, Subject, etc) *always* present, or are there
some situations that are going to break my resender?

Finally, if there's anyone interested in working on an MLM project (in PHP),
let me know. This really interests me, and seems like a worthwhile project -
Majordomo is dated and just doesn't cut the mustard anymore, and LISTSERV is
too expensive. I've looked at and tried a few others too, but none of them
really do what *I* want them to do. There seems to be room for a nice little
MLM for small mailing lists, with PHP doing the work (nice, simple, and
hackable), MySQL handling the data, and a nice, neat web interface.

I'm going to tinker with it anyway, but if anyone else wants to help out,
well, how bad.

Cheers,
adam