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Jason Rennie <jrennie@ai.mit.edu> writes:
> My sysadmins have told me that the sending mail client is supposed to
> escape lines begining with "From ".  EXMH (2.5) doesn't do this.  Should
> it?  It appears that my MH is MH 6.8.  Does NMH fix this?
Actually, this issue used to escalate into a religious war. The "From "
envelope is an artifact of the mbox mailbox format, and from that
perspective it should be the mail server that stores its mailboxes in
mbox format that should be responsible for escaping lines beginning with
"From ". On the other hand, this breaks the assumption that the mail
transport only touches the message headers and leaves the message body
alone.
Things like pgp signatures break when the mail server changes the message
body.
Also, strictly speaking, the mbox format envelope (or for us old-timers,
the UUCP envelope) isn't just any line beginning with "From ". It's really
"From", a single space, a valid email address, two spaces, and a valid
date.
For example:
From ptardif@nbnet.nb.ca  Sun Jul 14 08:53:57 2002
^                   ^^
--
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
IM: jabr@jabber.blu.org / abreauj@aim / abreauj@yahoo / 28611923@icq
Email jabr@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9
PGP-Key-Fingerprint 72 FB 39 4F 3C 3B D6 5B E0 C8 5A 6E F1 2C BE 99
Some people say, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
I often respond, "When elephants fight, it's the grass
that gets trampled."