GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 428728
Any line beginning with the word "From" in the body of an email is prepended with ">"
Last modified: 2009-09-07 10:26:05 UTC
When I compose a new email or reply, if a line starts with the word "From" a ">" is prepended before it's sent (it's been added by the time it's in the Outbox). The receipient therefore sees a spurious ">", which is confusing as this if often used to indicate a quoted reply (and ugly, and just wrong!). e.g. the following: " Oh dear. From the way this is written, I think it will be incorrectly munged. " is delivered as: " Oh dear. >From the way this is written, I think it will be incorrectly munged. " I'm guessing this may be something to do with escaping the From header in mbox files, but N.B. this is in the message body, not the header. I'm exclusively using IMAP servers and SMTP outgoing. "Format messages in HTML" is unchecked. (I've suffered this bug for a considerable time, but it only just clicked as to what was triggering it - previously I though it might be human error cut/selecting reply-quoted text. Unfortunately ">", "sent", "from", etc. aren't good bugzilla search terms!)
> I'm guessing this may be something to do with escaping the From header in mbox > files, but N.B. this is in the message body, not the header. actually, it's for escaping "From " in the message body, not header. Headers are <atom>: not <atom><space> unfortunately ">From " munging is not undoable. For more reading, see: http://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html note specifically, toward the bottom: > You should assume that "From " lines are quoted, not mangled. > On systems that mangle, mail gets corrupted no matter what you do. > If you assume quoting is used, you might save mail sometimes. I completely disagree. I was describing what the historical truth of this file format is: the facts about what is out there in the world today. If you do quoting, not mangling, you are following different rules than have been followed for decades. If, when I send a message, I type ``>From '' at the beginning of a line, and you treat it as quoting instead of mangling, you will alter the message. And you will alter it in a different way than all the other software out there which is following the ancient de-facto standard. Whether you treat it as quoting or mangling, either method will cause certain messages to be changed: neither is foolproof, as both make the assumption that all software is following the same rules, whichever they may be. I say, since neither method is foolproof, use the older and more prevalent rules, since that's what will get you maximal interoperability. You may think that turning ``>From '' into ``From '' is somehow more harmless than turning ``From '' into ``>From '', but I don't see why. For example, consider the case of a message with a clear-signed cryptographic signature (multipart/signed, say.) Any change to the body will cause the signature verification to fail. Now, suppose that the software doing the signing, being aware of the prevalence of From-mangling, were to do that mangling before signing. This would interoperate perfectly with software that did mangling in the traditional way (like, say... sendmail, or /bin/Mail). But software that tried to ``improve'' matters by changing the rules -- by mangling ``>From '' to ``>>From '', or by mangling ``>From '', to ``From '' -- would cause the signature to no longer match. It is in nobody's best interest for random pieces of software to try and ``improve'' on the BSD mbox format. It's a crummy format, but it is what it is. If you don't want to use it, don't -- use something else. But please, use something else that can be self-identified, that is programatically distinguishable from the historical format, so that software can know what it's parsing. Don't make us need to guess even more than we do now.
Ahah, I see that mbox is a little... quaint. However, given that my sent folder and Inbox are on IMAP servers[1], and I believe there's no requirement to use an mbox style encoding for SMTP, I don't see any reason why my mail needs to suffer from mbox quirks such as this? Sending an similar test email from a webmail front-end stores the email without ">" on the IMAP server, and indeed Evolution displays the delivered email without ">" from the IMAP inbox. So is it only passing through the Evolution local Outbox that subjects emails to mbox munging? This seems rather needless - couldn't the Outbox use a more modern encoding if this is what's happening? [1] backed by Maildir, it turns out, which happily seems to store test emails containing lines starting "from" without a ">"
in your case, it's not the INBOX nor Sent folder where the munging is taking place, but rather the Outbox (where mail goes temporarily while waiting in queue to be passed along to an SMTP server). Also worth noting is that most SMTP servers will store your mail in mbox format in their local queue (or in the user's mail spool if it is the final destination). > couldn't the Outbox use a more > modern encoding if this is what's happening? unfortunately, no. There's no "more modern encoding" in which to encode it :( Unfortunately this is a limitation of mbox which is the format which was chosen for local storage (largely to be compatible with every other Unix mailer in existence... while some can handle MH (even yuckier) or Maildir, not all can... and it was felt that we should use mbox so users would more easily be able to switch between mailers) Probably we should have just used Maildir anyway... oh well :\ The problem with Maildir, tho, is that there are multiple ways to do hierarchies of folders, which is annoying. Of course, we'd have just chosen one method and stuck with it, but what can ya do, eh?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 245683 ***