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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 23/07/2018 09:06, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 7/22/2018 1:27 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> >From my experience it's not only persistent but also necessary, resulting
>> from the continued use of Unix mailbox
>> fromat in all kinds of mail UA implementations.

(That was a small experiment to check that at least my UA
is very specifically looking for the string "From ".)

> 
> It represents a basic failure to keep a local hack local.  It's fine if 
> the local implementation needs to do something special to preserve data 
> integrity.  It is NOT fine for that modification of the data to escape 
> into the wild.
> 
> While the particular example is benign and even a bit amusing, it 
> highlights the need for implementation efforts that make changes made to 
> incoming data to reverse them on outgoing data.

The underlying computer science error is perhaps a failure to distinguish
between data and metadata. But on the other hand, consider how important
it still was in the 1970s to economise on memory and instructions: we
all used little tricks of this kind in those days.

   Brian