[ih] from whence cometh ">" ?

[Brian E Carpenter]

There's a slightly related point which I found mentioned in RFC 4155,
which defined the application/mbox media type:

>    Many implementations are also known to escape message body lines that
>    begin with the character sequence of "From ", so as to prevent
>    confusion with overly-liberal parsers that do not search for full
>    separator lines.  In the common case, a leading Greater-Than symbol
>    (0x3E) is used for this purpose (with "From " becoming ">From ").

MBOX format is notoriously variable and under-documented. RFC 4155 cites
http://qmail.org./man/man5/mbox.html which implies that everybody knows
about ">". If anybody can find the *original* specification of the MBOXO
format (that is not a typo) that might help.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 15-Oct-25 02:38, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote:
> I just spent half an hour digging through the msggroup, tcp-ip and
> header-people mailing lists from the mid to late 1970s and none of them use
> the diple.
> 
> So I'm guessing it was an innovation in one of the email or netnews reading
> tools developed in the late 1970s to early 1980s.  There are lots of
> choices that appeared about that time: readnews, rn, Berkeley Mail (?), MH
> and, I think, some Emacs reading tools.
> 
> Craig
> 
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2025 at 5:04 AM Eliot Lear via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Internet Historians,
>>
>> I wonder if anyone knows the earliest use of "> " as a means to quote
>> text.  A research here in Switzerland is asking me.  I can only date it
>> as far back as "rn" and netnews, but surely it goes back beyond 1984.
>> The researcher mentioned that there have been various forms of a
>> "diple"[1] as Ancient Greece and in the bible.  But when did it get
>> picked up in Internet times?
>>
>> Any takers?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Eliot
>>
>> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diple_(textual_symbol)
>>
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