Re: In mail, 'From' becomes '>From'
On Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 01:44:33PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> I've been noticing this on a number of messages both from and to me.
>
> Some lines beginning with 'From' are rewritten as '>From'. Needless to
> say, this utterly borks things like GPG signatures.
>
> I have no idea where this is happening (I run exim, fetchmail and mutt),
> or even if it's characteristic of my system, my ISP
> (Earthlink/Mindspring), or other mail intermediaries.
>
> Suggestions?
The thing is that mail messages are simply text files. Indeed, normal mailfiles
concatenate all messages into the same file. That requires that there be text
based means by which the header is differentiated from the body of the message
and the messages are differentiated from each other. ALL email messages start
with a line that begins with "From ", and so when an email program sees that
it knows that the last message has ended and that it's at the begining of a
new message. Of course, if you start a line in the message body that begins
with "From" and a space you don't mean that a new email message follows, and
any email transport program that isn't brain-dead (like exim) will escape that
line before sending it on it's way. This is appropriate. You can avoid this by
changing that word in any way, such as by not capitalizing it. But it's really
not a big deal... it shouldn't be interpreted as quoted text since a quotation
begins with a "> " (note the added space).
--
John Patton patton66@home.com
"The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially
annoying to those of us who do." - Harold Coffin
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