On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 06:40:34AM +0100, Rory Campbell-Lange wrote: > On 14/05/25, Kurt Hackenberg ([email protected]) wrote: > > On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 02:01:11PM +0100, Rory Campbell-Lange wrote:
> > > I believe that mutt uses mboxcl2 format for writing new mailboxes. I'd > > > be grateful to know if that is corrrect. > * MBOXCL: > Introduced by the “Classic” MBOX variant where each “From " line is > quoted with an ffrom string. > > * MBOXCL2: > A variation of MBOXCL where “From " lines are doubled to distinguish > them. It's interesting that in replies, Mutt uses >From escaping, though in the actual raw mbox file, it's not present. Is the "From " line doubled referring to the header sender and the first line (envelope-sender From)? >From reading some other docs, I think, though, that the lack of need to escape "From " has to do with the presence of the Content-Length header vs. the 2 From Headers? > >From the source in git it seems that Thomas Roessler committed the first > man pages for mutt in 1998 and the mbox file format in 2000. I think the existing git history includes the mercurial history, but presumably doesn't include whatever VCS system ME was using before dev moved into Mercurial (and later git); obviously the man pages probably predate that 1998 commit also, since Mutt was released in ~ 1995. > mention of MBOXCL format in the mbox man page until Urs Janßen's commit of > April 2004; so just over 20 years ago That commit does seem to _imply_ that mutt is using mboxcl2 I don't know much of the history / backstory here. This page: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000383.shtml has some details. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000386.shtml mentions MBOXCL and MBOXCL2 dating back to SYSVr4. So, if that's the case, that may have been the widely understood "mbox" used well before Mutt was first written? Since Mutt came out of ELM and similar mailers, as well as Michael Elkins's patches to ELM, I'd guess that its handling of mbox files probably is pretty similar to what ELM used. /w
