The reason that some people are seeing this problem has to do with the screwy mail servers to which they are connecting.
Normally when a mail server sends you a message, the beginning of the header looks like this:
Received: from mail.zip.zot by mail.foo.bar (Sendmail 8.6.12/950620.JB) with ESMTP id SAA06945; Tue, 29 Oct 1999 18:36:59 -0500
X-Mailer: someMailer
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-Id: <
[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1999 15:39:02 -0800
From: nobody@nowhere
To:
[email protected]
Subject: Where IS this yellow submarine we supposedly live in?
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Quoted-Printable
Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Disposition: Inline
The header contains one or more received lines, a to, from, subject, date, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Well if you look at one of the messages where this oddity is happening, you will see the first line of the header of the message is different, like this:
From <somewhere> Tue, 29 Oct 1999 19:38:50 -0500
Received: from mail.zip.zot by mail.foo.bar (Sendmail 8.6.12/950620.JB) with ESMTP id SAA06945; Tue, 29 Oct 1999 18:36:59 -0500
X-Mailer: someMailer
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-Id: <
[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1999 15:39:02 -0800
From: nobody@nowhere
To:
[email protected]
Subject: Where IS this yellow submarine we supposedly live in?
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Quoted-Printable
Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Disposition: Inline
What *IS* that line?
Well, those initial "From" lines are part of the "mbox" message file format used on unix boxes. When you use a unix-based mail package, as messages are added to your mail spool, the unix mail package puts one at the beginning of each message added to the spool so you know when the message was put into the mail spool.
So why are some mail servers erroneously prepending messages that they send to POP mail clients?
I have no idea. They SHOULDN'T be sending out mail with those filer lines prepended to the top of each message. It really is a bug in the mail server software. Yell at whomever makes your mail server software and tell them to stop doing that.
So why doesn't this happen in other e-mail packages?
Well, it seems that the parser inside of OE 5 which parses the headers simply looks for lines beginning with the special header words like "To", "From", "Subject", "Date", etc. where other mail packages are looking for those same words immediately followed by a colon, i.e. "To:", "From:", etc. So because OE isn't expecting that mbox filer line to be at the beginning of the message it receives from the POP server, it doesn't bother checking to see if there's a colon after the "From". As a result it thinks the filer line at the beginning is the "From:" header in the mail message. It is wrong.
So, ultimately there are two things at fault here. First, the goofy mail servers should NOT be sending you mail files with that extra "From ..." line at the top, they are violating the internet's IETF standard, RFC822, by doing that. So yell at them. Secondly, MS didn't write defensive code which is anal-retentive enough to require the colon after the header token. The MS guys evidently never expected to get incorrectly formed messages from any mail servers. They were wrong. They should change their code to look for the colon. So until they do, yell at your ISP or whomever and tell them to get their server to not send you bad RFC822 messages because the stuff they're sending out is wrong.
There is evidently an AppleScript which was written by one of the MS guys which fixes messages you get like this. I think it's available on the unofficial OE site.
http://www.macemail.com/oe/ 
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