GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 529215
From appears as quoted text
Last modified: 2012-10-18 14:48:31 UTC
Please describe the problem: when you create an email if you start a new line with a capitalised From ie From here you can see for miles. when the email is sent it has that line ghosted as if a quote on a previous mail. >From here you can see for miles (gray) only does it for the first instance and only if the first letter is captialised Steps to reproduce: 1. write a new mail in evolution making 'From' the first word in a sentence 2. send the mail. check 'sent' mail folder you will find that line as quoted 3. the sent mail is the same. Actual results: evolution makes that line as quoted text Expected results: for it not to show as quoted text Does this happen every time? yep Other information: nope just trying to be helpful
this is a limitation of the berkley mail spool format which uses "From " to delineate messages, so content must be escaped with a ">" if a line begins with a "From ".
*** Bug 586412 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 686258 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Just some technical notes here, as this seems to have been the first report of this major corruption issue in Evolution (more of information of mine can be found in the bug #686258, which was hidden behind this one). This issue is absolutely a solvable and actually quite easily. All other MUAs and mailservers I've checked in a quick glance few minutes ago handle it correctly by one of even (!!) several ways. As one can even read on Wikipeda, the mbox format is actually just a family of several subformats, mboxo, mboxrd, mboxcl, mboxcl2. Only the legacy mboxo format can't solve the From_ line issue, for which reason the other formats exist the transparently solve the problem. This is done by either quoting or by adding a Content-Length field. The quoting of course, must happen also for already quoted From_ (_ is actually a space) lines,.. so From_ gets >From_ >From_ gets >>From_ and so on. It even works that you mix the different formats in on mbox file, the existence of the Content-Length field can be used to determine that. So someone should reopen the bug and remove the wrong notabug status.
It's even simpler than that. I got redirected into this bug, because it happens with IMAP protocol (with the local mail cache in non-mbox format). So Evolution isn't using mbox format ANYWHERE in my system, yet for some unknown reason it wants to escape the From_ lines for absolutely no good reason.
Ah, sorry, looks like my IMAP use case has already been fixed :) So ignore that. Time for me to Un-Cc myself from this bug then. As for Christoph: mbox format is becoming quite irrelevant nowadays, just switch to Maildir or IMAP. I wouldn't waste time on an obsolete format not behaving perfectly.
Timo, I know that maildir is in most cases superior.... but not all scenarios. That's why I also heavily criticised Evolution developers when they simply dropped their old local mbox-based format. Problems with maildir (which are less problematic with mbox): a) possibly enromous loss of storage to block fragmentation (even with filesystems optimised to small files)... when you have gigantic mail archives. b) much slower full text search (you have to open/close gazillions of files) Cheers, Chris.
Oh one last technical addition to this issue (guess bug #686258 is dead now, as it's to much cluttered with discussions)... Of course corruption happens in both ways... when exporting/saving to mbox AND when importing/reading from mbox. Cause in both directions no quoting / unquoting is done. And of course in both ways the different sub formats (mboxrd, mboxcl2, etc.) of the mbox family are not really handled.