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

[Tony Finch]

> On 5 Jan 2017, at 00:25, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This page suggests to me that finding the earliest documentation of the Unix mbox format would be instructive:

The mbox format is mostly ignorant of how message bodies are formatted: it doesn't care about reply quoting conventions or MIME or whatever. But the ugly mbox >From hack does go back a long way, before 4.2BSD. I have no idea if it had any influence on how users decided to format replies...

BTW, If anyone else wants to dig through old code, I found it surprisingly effective to simply

        grep -R '">' .

i.e. look for string constants starting with the quote marker. A lot of the false positives were the >From hack, or interactive prompts.

Tony.
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