On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 02:46:07PM -0400, Mark E. Mallett wrote:
One case in point: the bit about only quoting "From_" lines if preceded by a blank line. That's one heuristic (if I dare to use the word) that was pretty randomly followed in the past. It mostly is now, but has not always been.
Those are two different variants of mbox, and they're incompatible. Software that expects every "From " line in the message to be escaped, will misread a file where some of those lines are not escaped.
Of course, most existing software does a lot of heuristics to try to read all variants of mbox, so can probably read both of those.
(Original mbox, from 1974, escaped every message "From " line; the Berkeley variant created few years later did the after-blank-line thing.)
