On Sat 13 Jun 2020 at 16:05:17 (+0200), l0f...@tuta.io wrote: > 13 juin 2020 à 14:21 de a...@strugglers.net: > > > The mbox mail archive format is a single file containing all > > messages concatenated together. Separate messages are recognised by > > a line that starts: > > > > >From > y...@example.com> ... > > > > As you can imagine if a message body contained such text it might > > prematurely end the emails and then the next email would be of an > > invalid format. > > > > As a result a lot of (mostly older) mail software escapes mail body > > lines that begin with "From" by putting a ">" in front, sometimes > > even when not in the context of archiving into an mbox. This is most > > likely what happened here. The use of ">" for this is just a very > > common convention. > > > Thanks, I was not aware of this. > However, this extra ">" should have been deleted upon viewing the email, no?
How would the viewer's email client know whether the > in >From had been added by some such scheme as above and should be removed, or was a genuine occurrence in the original email? > If I'm right, escaping "From" with a leading ">" is just for mailing software > internals (mbox), the reverse process is applied when displaying the final > message... Cheers, David.