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

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Tue Jan 3 09:25:02 PST 2017


    >> From: Glenn Fleishman

    >> I read early RFCs and other documents, and was unable to find the
    >> origin of [']>['] for quoting a reply.

I'm pretty sure that there was no formal discussion of it, at least I don't
recall seeing any (although email wasn't my area of specialization); I
strongly suspect that someone just started doing it, and it was obviously such
a good idea, everyone copied it. (That's certainly how I started with it.)

One avenue to look at is to see if some mail reader (e.g. RMail, in Emacs)
was coded to do that on replies, and that's where people got it from.

	Noel



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