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

[John R. Levine]

On Sun, 22 Jul 2018, Dave Crocker wrote:
> I don't recall quoting being done by the native Unix mail command, which was 
> all there was in Unix from the Labs.

>From the source code to mail.c in v7 Unix, dated May 1979:

 		if (isfrom(line))
 			fputs(">", tmpf);

The v6 mail program is quite different and doesn't do that.  The v7 mail 
pogram knew about uucp and shipped off any message with a ! in the 
recipient address.

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