[Solved] How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
On Sun, Jun 12, 2005 at 10:39:10PM -0600, Danny MacMillan wrote: Hello, Every time I read an email that has a line in the message body that starts with the word From, the line is quoted with a character. It is my understanding that this is done necessarily when email is stored in the mbox format to distinguish lines that start new email messages from lines that are just part of the message body and just Happen to start with From. However, I am not using the mbox message format. I am using qmail with Maildir delivery as my MTA. I read my email using mutt to connect to a dovecot IMAP server, all built from ports on a FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE machine. I know this isn't a FreeBSD question per se, but I can't identify the piece of software that is either a) inserting the when it shouldn't or b) not removing the when it should. I have done my best to search the net for the answer but when the most significant search term is the word From and the second most significant is the character ... well, let's just say I was not successful and leave it at that. I vaguely remember reading something about it a long time ago before I myself was plagued with the problem but I can't for the life of me remember where. It turns out that when I send the same email both to freebsd-test@ and directly to the account I have subscribed to that list, the mail delivered via the list has the From line quoting and the other one doesn't. So it looks like the list is actually sending the From lines quoted over the wire and my FreeBSD configuration is okay. Most of the mail I read on this box is list traffic so I didn't notice. -- Danny MacMillan ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Solved] How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
On Jun 14, 2005, at 2:17 PM, Danny MacMillan wrote: On Sun, Jun 12, 2005 at 10:39:10PM -0600, Danny MacMillan wrote: Hello, Every time I read an email that has a line in the message body that starts with the word From, the line is quoted with a character. It is my understanding that this is done necessarily when email is stored in the mbox format to distinguish lines that start new email messages from lines that are just part of the message body and just Happen to start with From. However, I am not using the mbox message format. I am using qmail with Maildir delivery as my MTA. I read my email using mutt to connect to a dovecot IMAP server, all built from ports on a FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE machine. I know this isn't a FreeBSD question per se, but I can't identify the piece of software that is either a) inserting the when it shouldn't or b) not removing the when it should. I have done my best to search the net for the answer but when the most significant search term is the word From and the second most significant is the character ... well, let's just say I was not successful and leave it at that. I vaguely remember reading something about it a long time ago before I myself was plagued with the problem but I can't for the life of me remember where. It turns out that when I send the same email both to freebsd-test@ and directly to the account I have subscribed to that list, the mail delivered via the list has the From line quoting and the other one doesn't. So it looks like the list is actually sending the From lines quoted over the wire and my FreeBSD configuration is okay. Most of the mail I read on this box is list traffic so I didn't notice. On this list? I forget what it's called now, but qualcomm had a method of quoting messages so that email would be indented properly on very small displays, and it's a format that Mail.app uses in quoting things...and I don't have the , but rather colored lines showing indenting, so from what I can tell there's a formatting code being put into the message to assist with proper word wrapping and the MUA is responsible for properly interpreting the text. Perhaps it's a combination of factors; I remember some mail agents give you an option of how to prefix quoted messages (the , custom characters, etc.). Only other thing I could suggest would be a sniff dump of the messages flying over the wire then retracing them to find out exactly what's happening, or see if your MUA stores messages in a plain format that can be viewed on the console and see what exactly is in them (or use a hex editor on the source to see if there are non-visible characters embedded in the text for formatting purposes). ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Solved] How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 02:28:45PM -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote: On Jun 14, 2005, at 2:17 PM, Danny MacMillan wrote: It turns out that when I send the same email both to freebsd-test@ and directly to the account I have subscribed to that list, the mail delivered via the list has the From line quoting and the other one doesn't. So it looks like the list is actually sending the From lines quoted over the wire and my FreeBSD configuration is okay. Most of the mail I read on this box is list traffic so I didn't notice. On this list? I forget what it's called now, but qualcomm had a method of quoting messages so that email would be indented properly on very small displays, and it's a format that Mail.app uses in quoting things...and I don't have the , but rather colored lines showing indenting, so from what I can tell there's a formatting code being put into the message to assist with proper word wrapping and the MUA is responsible for properly interpreting the text. I believe you're talking about format=flowed. I remember it from a posting war last year sometime. The thing is that the format is determined by the sender, and this is happening even to messages sent by me, and those messages are not in that format. GUI mail clients sometimes are able to represent the characters at the beginnings of lines as meaning that the line contains quoted text and represent that graphically. Opera does it, it sounds like Mail.app does it too. But they can only work with the text that is there in the first place. Mail.app might have some real fuzzy logic built in if it doesn't interpet those From lines as quoted text. Perhaps it's a combination of factors; I remember some mail agents give you an option of how to prefix quoted messages (the , custom characters, etc.). Yes, most do, but that setting only comes into play when you are replying to or forwarding messages and quoting the original. It happens on the sending side. The issue I'm having is that the message is altered in transit. It is sent without a in front of the From lines, but it arrives with a in front of the From lines. Only other thing I could suggest would be a sniff dump of the messages flying over the wire then retracing them to find out exactly what's happening, or see if your MUA stores messages in a plain format that can be viewed on the console and see what exactly is in them (or use a hex editor on the source to see if there are non-visible characters embedded in the text for formatting purposes). That's good advice. The mail store on this box is a Maildir folder. The messages are stored in plain RFC822 format. Those From lines are indeed quoted in the mail store, so I guess I can absolve Mutt of all wrongdoing :) Dovecot too for that matter. I don't have those sniff dump of the messages flying over the wire smarts. If you can recommend a tool for doing that I would appreciate it. Thanks for your reply. -- Danny MacMillan ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Solved] How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
On Jun 14, 2005, at 3:15 PM, Danny MacMillan wrote: On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 02:28:45PM -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote: On Jun 14, 2005, at 2:17 PM, Danny MacMillan wrote: It turns out that when I send the same email both to freebsd-test@ and directly to the account I have subscribed to that list, the mail delivered via the list has the From line quoting and the other one doesn't. So it looks like the list is actually sending the From lines quoted over the wire and my FreeBSD configuration is okay. Most of the mail I read on this box is list traffic so I didn't notice. On this list? I forget what it's called now, but qualcomm had a method of quoting messages so that email would be indented properly on very small displays, and it's a format that Mail.app uses in quoting things...and I don't have the , but rather colored lines showing indenting, so from what I can tell there's a formatting code being put into the message to assist with proper word wrapping and the MUA is responsible for properly interpreting the text. I believe you're talking about format=flowed. I remember it from a posting war last year sometime. The thing is that the format is determined by the sender, and this is happening even to messages sent by me, and those messages are not in that format. format=flowed is correct, as my dusty mental archives tell me. Works well...wish it caught on more :-) That way there's less of a cut your postings at line 72 complaint. I hate manual formatting of my sentences. Are you absolutely certain that that formatting isn't getting into your messages by your MUA? It would be very strange indeed for an MTA to start reformatting it. I would be more inclined to believe that your MUA has the codes inserted and something may be *stripping* them out, or maybe converting to another format/MIME type or something like that in transit before thinking that an MTA or filter is *inserting* characters. Probably only sniffing the traffic would tell that for sure. GUI mail clients sometimes are able to represent the characters at the beginnings of lines as meaning that the line contains quoted text and represent that graphically. Opera does it, it sounds like Mail.app does it too. But they can only work with the text that is there in the first place. Mail.app might have some real fuzzy logic built in if it doesn't interpet those From lines as quoted text. Mail interprets the flowed formatting and interprets it correctly for indenting. I'm not sure where there's a reference of how different message formats handle hard and soft representations of quoted material... :-/ Perhaps it's a combination of factors; I remember some mail agents give you an option of how to prefix quoted messages (the , custom characters, etc.). Yes, most do, but that setting only comes into play when you are replying to or forwarding messages and quoting the original. It happens on the sending side. The issue I'm having is that the message is altered in transit. It is sent without a in front of the From lines, but it arrives with a in front of the From lines. Or some clients (pure speculation here) may be representing where they're putting a format=flowed quotation symbol in by using that character or other times, depending on the format of the message, are actually inserting the into the message and displaying both times with the same symbol. I.e., sometimes the is really a hardcoded , other times the is a symbolic entry to tell you where it would be inserted as a quote. Then the people on the receiving end would see the in the former case and whatever their MUA translates the code to in the latter. Again, pure speculation. Sorry... :-( But it would explain some of the behavior you've outlined. Only other thing I could suggest would be a sniff dump of the messages flying over the wire then retracing them to find out exactly what's happening, or see if your MUA stores messages in a plain format that can be viewed on the console and see what exactly is in them (or use a hex editor on the source to see if there are non-visible characters embedded in the text for formatting purposes). That's good advice. The mail store on this box is a Maildir folder. The messages are stored in plain RFC822 format. Those From lines are indeed quoted in the mail store, so I guess I can absolve Mutt of all wrongdoing :) Dovecot too for that matter. I don't have those sniff dump of the messages flying over the wire smarts. If you can recommend a tool for doing that I would appreciate it. TCPDump is the standard workhorse for sniffing traffic on Unix. For the more graphically inclined, my favorite has been Ethereal. Make sure you run them with root priv to access the interface in promiscuous mode. There are a number of options for dumping output to logs or in hex/ascii format, etc. so you might want to look up an article on using Ethereal. Dsniff also comes to mind, but I
RE: [Solved] How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
This is a function of the receiving MTA. mbox format inserts a line at the beginning of each email in the form of: From [EMAIL PROTECTED] date This serves as a message delimiter inside the flat text file format of mbox. Your POP3 mail server needs these lines. Anyway, any time another line within the headers or message body BEGINS with From xxx... it will be prepended with a single to preserve the validity of the message delimiters. This is easy to test. telnet to your mail server on port 25 and manually deposit an email that has the following lines: this is a test From: hello From From hello see which will be prepended This is an entirely distinct issue from the 'quoting' of previous message bodies (as in below) -- John Brooks [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Danny MacMillan Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 2:16 PM To: Bart Silverstrim Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: [Solved] How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body? On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 02:28:45PM -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote: On Jun 14, 2005, at 2:17 PM, Danny MacMillan wrote: It turns out that when I send the same email both to freebsd-test@ and directly to the account I have subscribed to that list, the mail delivered via the list has the From line quoting and the other one doesn't. So it looks like the list is actually sending the From lines quoted over the wire and my FreeBSD configuration is okay. Most of the mail I read on this box is list traffic so I didn't notice. On this list? I forget what it's called now, but qualcomm had a method of quoting messages so that email would be indented properly on very small displays, and it's a format that Mail.app uses in quoting things...and I don't have the , but rather colored lines showing snip . ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Solved] How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 03:33:23PM -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote: ... Are you absolutely certain that that formatting isn't getting into your messages by your MUA? It would be very strange indeed for an MTA to start reformatting it. I would be more inclined to believe that your MUA has the codes inserted and something may be *stripping* them out, or maybe converting to another format/MIME type or something like that in transit before thinking that an MTA or filter is *inserting* characters. Probably only sniffing the traffic would tell that for sure. Using tcpdump I have confirmed that my system is reproducing with perfect fidelity the messages as they are transmitted over the wire. Those characters are being added before they reach my system. The law of parsimony says that it's the Mailman software running this list that's doing it. ... TCPDump is the standard workhorse for sniffing traffic on Unix. For the more graphically inclined, my favorite has been Ethereal. Make sure you run them with root priv to access the interface in promiscuous mode. There are a number of options for dumping output to logs or in hex/ascii format, etc. so you might want to look up an article on using Ethereal. Dsniff also comes to mind, but I can't remember what exactly that was designed to capture; there's also Ettercap. Thanks for the tcpdump tip. That tool is solid gold. -- Danny MacMillan ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
Hello, Every time I read an email that has a line in the message body that starts with the word From, the line is quoted with a character. It is my understanding that this is done necessarily when email is stored in the mbox format to distinguish lines that start new email messages from lines that are just part of the message body and just Happen to start with From. However, I am not using the mbox message format. I am using qmail with Maildir delivery as my MTA. I read my email using mutt to connect to a dovecot IMAP server, all built from ports on a FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE machine. I know this isn't a FreeBSD question per se, but I can't identify the piece of software that is either a) inserting the when it shouldn't or b) not removing the when it should. I have done my best to search the net for the answer but when the most significant search term is the word From and the second most significant is the character ... well, let's just say I was not successful and leave it at that. I vaguely remember reading something about it a long time ago before I myself was plagued with the problem but I can't for the life of me remember where. I'm hoping someone here can shed some light on this subject because I can't and it's driving me crazy. Thanks, ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
Every time I read an email that has a line in the message body that starts with the word From, the line is quoted with a character. I'd say that 1) when you read an email the was added by the sender, before the email was send to you, so it is normal that you cannot find where it was added. 2) when you are sending and email, you have to add the else you will not conform to email format anymore and you would be liklely to create problems to the recipient... So leave the where it is :) Olivier ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How to disable quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 11:45:31AM +0700, Olivier Nicole wrote: Every time I read an email that has a line in the message body that starts with the word From, the line is quoted with a character. I'd say that 1) when you read an email the was added by the sender, before the email was send to you, so it is normal that you cannot find where it was added. 2) when you are sending and email, you have to add the else you will not conform to email format anymore and you would be liklely to create problems to the recipient... So leave the where it is :) Hi, Olivier. Thank you for your reply. The model you describe above doesn't seem consistent with the symptoms I'm seeing. I think it's got to be a problem with my machine because: 1) I have numerous email accounts, some of which are delivered to this FreeBSD machine on my network and some of which I retrieve via POP3 from my ISP's mail server. I read the mail delivered to my FreeBSD machine using Mutt etc. as I detailed earlier. I read the mail delivered to my ISP using Outlook 2k. If the same email with a line starting with From is delivered to both places, only the email delivered to this machine has those lines quoted with the character. That points rather definitively to some difference on this machine's email pipeline as being the culprit. 2) While my knowledge of the RFCs is far from enyclopaedic, I do know that they generally prescribe the on-the-wire format only. The quoting is a fundamental requirement of the mbox store design but is completely superfluous for message transmission. Including the quoting as a requirement for transmission would be a very bad design. I quickly scanned RFC 2821 and didn't see anything suggesting that it was a requirement. For this reason, and because of the behaviour outlined in point 1) above, I don't think the is being transmitted; rather I think it is being added by something on my machine, now that I think it through. 3) This is hardly conclusive, but I have connected to SMTP servers using telnet on port 25 and sent mail with lines starting with From in the body, and these messages arrived at their destination intact. I welcome further input. -- Danny MacMillan ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
