Yeh, this is a sop to old style Unix mailboxes that got codified into the mail standard, basically.
Ancient history, if anyone cares: The message delimiter was /^From /, so internal ones had to be escaped somehow. Prefixing "> " was how ancient /bin/mail did it, so that ended up in the standard to avoid disturbing such systems. It didn't change until Solaris 2 finally added a size to the header (in a rather annoying fashion). Many mail processing tools, including some mailing list archive software, still assume this and will break if they're not escaped. On Tue, Jul 21, 2026 at 10:14 AM Tom Ellis via ghc-devs < [email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 21, 2026 at 04:36:34PM +0300, Wolfgang Jeltsch via ghc-devs > wrote: > > I’ve seen it several times that text in mails on this list was prefixed > > with a `>` although it was not a quotation, which can be very confusing. > > See RFC 4155 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4155.html), top of > page 3. > > Tom > _______________________________________________ > ghc-devs mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > -- brandon s allbery kf8nh [email protected]
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