On Sat, Jul 07, 2018 at 07:55:26AM +0000, Curt wrote: > On 2018-07-07, davidson <david...@freevolt.org> wrote: > > Speculation: I suspect that the listserv software escapes "From" after > > a newline, and that its chosen escape is synonymous with the embedded > > quote character.[1]
> The culprit is therefore Wooledge himself. The culprit is "mbox". <http://jdebp.eu./FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html> Because the 5-byte string "From " at the start of a line delimits new messages in "mbox" formats, many mail systems will alter the body of a message, placing ">" in front of leading "From " strings. This happens quite frequently. As JDEBP writes on the web page cited above: The "mboxo" mailbox format uses irreversible "From quoting" that corrupts messages. Before a message is appended to a "mboxo" mailbox file, it is transformed. Any line of the message, in either the header or the body, that begins with the five characters 'F', 'r', 'o', 'm', and ' ' has a single '>' character prepended to it. This transformation is irreversible because it is impossible to distinguish, when reading a message, a line that began '>From ' in the original message from a line that began 'From ' in the original message and that was subsequently transformed.
