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

[Dave Crocker]

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/


-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net