[Solved] How to disable > quoting of lines starting with From in email body?

Danny MacMillan flowers at users.sourceforge.net
Tue Jun 14 18:18:21 GMT 2005


On Sun, Jun 12, 2005 at 10:39:10PM -0600, Danny MacMillan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 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.
> 
> It is my understanding that this is done necessarily when email is
> stored in the mbox format to distinguish lines that start new email
> messages from lines that are just part of the message body and just
> Happen to start with "From".  However, I am not using the mbox
> message format.
> 
> I am using qmail with Maildir delivery as my MTA.  I read my email
> using mutt to connect to a dovecot IMAP server, all built from
> ports on a FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE machine.
> 
> I know this isn't a FreeBSD question per se, but I can't identify
> the piece of software that is either a) inserting the > when it
> shouldn't or b) not removing the > when it should.  I have done
> my best to search the net for the answer but when the most
> significant search term is the word "From" and the second most
> significant is the > character ... well, let's just say I was
> not successful and leave it at that.  I vaguely remember reading
> something about it a long time ago before I myself was plagued
> with the problem but I can't for the life of me remember where.

It turns out that when I send the same email both to freebsd-test@
and directly to the account I have subscribed to that list, the
mail delivered via the list has the From line quoting and the other
one doesn't.  So it looks like the list is actually sending the
>From lines quoted over the wire and my FreeBSD configuration is
okay.  Most of the mail I read on this box is list traffic so
I didn't notice.

-- 
Danny MacMillan



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