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

[John R. Levine]

>>  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.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly