[ih] Reporter query on the history of greater-than in quoted replies

[Guy Almes]

Dave et al.,
   In the world of Internet History, this is a quite small matter, but

[1] it is an unending source of amusement and very occasional 
frustration when one sees the '>' preceding the word "From" in web sites 
and emails and even on text displayed on TV shows where, somewhere along 
the line, some piece of software was making sure it was not 
misinterpreted as the beginning of an email message.  And very few 
non-internet-nerds know what it's about.

[2] it also is a simple (and relatively harmless) example of how little 
expedient decisions made *many* years ago, when combined with the need 
for various forms of "compatibility", have consequences.

   I suspect that long after the cockroaches have gone extinct, that '>' 
will still be popping up.
	-- Guy

On 7/22/18 2:28 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 7/22/2018 8:33 AM, John R. Levine wrote:
>>>>    I'd guess it came via the >From convention in unix format mailboxes to
>>>>    quote lines that would otherwise look like messages separators.
>>>
>>> Allman introduced the ">" quoting of From at the beginning of a line in in
>>> delivermail, I believe, but certainly by the time of sendmail.  As you
>>> suggest, it was to prevent the string from being interpreted as a start of
>>> message.
>>
>> I think it has to be earlier than that.  We had mailboxes with "From "
>> separators on timeshared unix systems in the 1970s.  If I have a chance
>> I'll look at some of the old source code.
> 
> 
> As I wrote, I was referring to the angle-bracket quoting of 'from' at
> the start of a line, to keep it from being interpreted as
> start-of-message.
> 
> I don't recall quoting being done by the native Unix mail command, which
> was all there was in Unix from the Labs.
> 
> (I think the actual use of mail as a separator was "<nl>from"...)
> 
> d/
> 
>