T-PROT -- TOFU protection
=========================

1. What the hell is TOFU?
   As the man page says:
   TOFU is an abbreviation which mixes German and English words; it expands
   to "text oben, full-quote unten" which means "text above  -  full  quote
   below"  and describes the style of so many users who let their mailer or
   newsreader quote everything of the previous message and  just  add  some
   text  at  the  top;  obviously  they  think that quoted text must not be
   changed at all.  This is quite annoying as it needlessly sends a lot  of
   data  even when it is not required. Some editing of messages is desired.
   Please point these people to the page
     http://www.river.com/users/share/etiquette/edit.html
   Thank you!

2. What does the script do?
   It detects,  and when demanded  hides annoying parts in rfc5322 messages:
   TOFU, huge quoted blocks, signatures (especially when they are too long),
   excessive punktuation,  blocks of empty lines,  trailing spaces and tabs.
   For use inside of MTAs or MDAs it exits with appropriate libc exit codes,
   so annoying messages may be bounced easily.
   
3. For what can I use it?
   There are  several possibilities.  One is  to filter your email  or news 
   messages when  displaying them  in your User Agent.  Another is blocking
   annoying messages entirely from your system  -  using the script in some
   sendmail  (see the man page for an  example)  or procmail rule,  or even
   inside innd.

4. Give me some example!  What about  an example configuration  for the MUA 
   mutt(1), or the NUA slrn(1)?
   An example is included in the distribution.  Please see the man page for
   further details on the activated features.

5. And what about other User Agents?
   I just use  mutt and slrn,  so I do  not know how to  filter messages in
   other User Agents.  If you know  how to incorporate  t-prot e.g. in Gnus,
   please just drop me a note. ;)

6. Where did the idea come from?
   Many thanks  to  Gerhard H. Wrodnigg  who uses a  TOFU protection script 
   in order to keep  the responses to his cancel bot reasonably short.  The
   entire inspiration for this hack came from the "TOFU protection" line of
   his script on many usenet postings.


T-PROT AND SUPPORT FOR GETOPT::LONG
===================================

Most distributions (it seems to me) are quite eager to abandon Getopt::Mixed,
having Getopt::Long in the official Perl package, which does everything the
former module did. Getopt::Mixed is unmaintained and marked deprecated by
its author, so why keep it?

The answer is simple: because it's much faster (GNU time(1) tells me 28%
faster for running my complete t-prot release test suite consisting of
real-life emails) than anything I could get out of Getopt::Long. Plus,
from my point of view, there are no problems having a package installed
that is well-tested and just works fine (you don't need updates and more
new shiny features if the software just does what you want it to do).

So we have the choice between easy maintainance and better performance.

For the time being, I made my choice and keep sticking to Getopt::Mixed as
long as it works as-is with current stable perl versions. That does not mean
I don't see the merits of a well-maintained standard module, which is already
available on any perl system out there. Thus, a patch is provided to allow
easy migration to Getopt::Long for anyone who likes this better. I hope
this solution is fine for everyone.