Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 23:30:59 -0600 From: Danny MacMillan <flowers@users.sourceforge.net> To: Olivier Nicole <on@cs.ait.ac.th> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How to disable > quoting of lines starting with From in email body? Message-ID: <20050613053059.GB55431@aldebaran.local> In-Reply-To: <200506130445.j5D4jVKM096025@banyan.cs.ait.ac.th> References: <20050613043910.GA55308@aldebaran.local> <200506130445.j5D4jVKM096025@banyan.cs.ait.ac.th>
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On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 11:45:31AM +0700, Olivier Nicole wrote: > > Every time I read an email that has a line in the message body that > > starts with the word "From", the line is quoted with a > character. > > I'd say that > > 1) when you read an email the > was added by the sender, before the > email was send to you, so it is normal that you cannot find where > it was added. > > 2) when you are sending and email, you have to add the > else you will > not conform to email format anymore and you would be liklely to > create problems to the recipient... > > So leave the > where it is :) Hi, Olivier. Thank you for your reply. The model you describe above doesn't seem consistent with the symptoms I'm seeing. I think it's got to be a problem with my machine because: 1) I have numerous email accounts, some of which are delivered to this FreeBSD machine on my network and some of which I retrieve via POP3 from my ISP's mail server. I read the mail delivered to my FreeBSD machine using Mutt etc. as I detailed earlier. I read the mail delivered to my ISP using Outlook 2k. If the same email with a line starting with "From" is delivered to both places, only the email delivered to this machine has those lines quoted with the ">" character. That points rather definitively to some difference on this machine's email pipeline as being the culprit. 2) While my knowledge of the RFCs is far from enyclopaedic, I do know that they generally prescribe the on-the-wire format only. The ">" quoting is a fundamental requirement of the mbox store design but is completely superfluous for message transmission. Including the > quoting as a requirement for transmission would be a very bad design. I quickly scanned RFC 2821 and didn't see anything suggesting that it was a requirement. For this reason, and because of the behaviour outlined in point 1) above, I don't think the > is being transmitted; rather I think it is being added by something on my machine, now that I think it through. 3) This is hardly conclusive, but I have connected to SMTP servers using telnet on port 25 and sent mail with lines starting with From in the body, and these messages arrived at their destination intact. I welcome further input. -- Danny MacMillan
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