How to disable > quoting of lines starting with From in email
body?
Danny MacMillan
flowers at users.sourceforge.net
Mon Jun 13 05:31:42 GMT 2005
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
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