How to disable > quoting of lines starting with From in email body?

[Danny MacMillan]

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