On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 08:57:56PM -0400, Kurt Hackenberg wrote:
> On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 02:25:44PM -0700, Will Yardley wrote:
>
> > It's interesting that in replies, Mutt uses >From escaping, though in
> > the actual raw mbox file, it's not present.
>
> No, you're confusing two different uses of '>' at the beginning of a line.
>
> A reply can quote the original message, and when it does, and the reply is
> plain text, then each line of the quoted text is preceded with '>', to mark
> it as a quote. This convention originated in Usenet, long ago. It has
> nothing to do with file formats.
>
> You can see that in this message: in your text, quoted above, each line is
> preceded with '>'.
Yes, I understand how quote markers look, but you'll notice that any
body (non-header) lines starting with a leading "From " are escaped with
a leading '>' (no space).
And I realized that yes, it's present in the raw file -- in the context
it's supposed to be (lines _other_ than the "postmark line" or the From:
header lines). I was just confused because the earlier post had seemed
to imply that this was not done / needed for MBOXCL2.
This behavior is documented in mbox(5):
In order to avoid misinterpretation of lines in message bodies which
begin with the four characters "From", followed by a space
character, the mail delivery agent must quote any occurrence of
"From " at the start of a body line.
There are two different quoting schemes, the first (MBOXO)
only quotes plain "From " lines in the body by prepending a
'>' to the line; the second (MBOXRD) also quotes already
quoted "From " lines by prepending a '>'
w
