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

[Stephen Casner]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2017, Stephen Casner wrote:

> One other precursor that I observed was the following example line
> from 1981:
>
>     >From decvax!duke!unc!smb  Fri Jun  5 08:45:48 1981
>
> This looks like an example of the MTA inserting the bracket to avoid
> having the word "From" at the beginning of a line be detected as the
> envelope field marking the start of a message in the email file.  That
> practice continues today.  Perhaps this use of the bracket came first
> and suggested the use for quoting of nested messages.

I should add that this was a case where a message was inserted
wholesale into a reply without any quoting, hence the inclusion of the
envelope From line.

The other examples that I found having angle brackets at the left
margin in email before 1985 were cases where a portion of a
command-line typescript was included in the message and the prompt
character for the CLI was the angle bracket.  That may have been
another source contributing to the uptake for quoting purposes.

                                                        -- Steve