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Date:      Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:15:38 -0600
From:      Danny MacMillan <flowers@users.sourceforge.net>
To:        Bart Silverstrim <bsilver@chrononomicon.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: [Solved] How to disable > quoting of lines starting with From in email body?
Message-ID:  <20050614191538.GD510@aldebaran.local>
In-Reply-To: <366c9fa64160b1789cdef8a524864036@chrononomicon.com>
References:  <20050613043910.GA55308@aldebaran.local> <20050614181719.GC510@aldebaran.local> <366c9fa64160b1789cdef8a524864036@chrononomicon.com>

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On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 02:28:45PM -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
> 
> On Jun 14, 2005, at 2:17 PM, Danny MacMillan wrote:
> 
> >It turns out that when I send the same email both to freebsd-test@
> >and directly to the account I have subscribed to that list, the
> >mail delivered via the list has the From line quoting and the other
> >one doesn't.  So it looks like the list is actually sending the
> >From lines quoted over the wire and my FreeBSD configuration is
> >okay.  Most of the mail I read on this box is list traffic so
> >I didn't notice.
> 
> On this list?  I forget what it's called now, but qualcomm had a method 
> of quoting messages so that email would be indented properly on very 
> small displays, and it's a format that Mail.app uses in quoting 
> things...and I don't have the ">", but rather colored lines showing 
> indenting, so from what I can tell there's a formatting code being put 
> into the message to assist with proper word wrapping and the MUA is 
> responsible for properly interpreting the text.

I believe you're talking about format=flowed.  I remember it from a
posting war last year sometime.  The thing is that the format is
determined by the sender, and this is happening even to messages
sent by me, and those messages are not in that format.

GUI mail clients sometimes are able to represent the > characters at
the beginnings of lines as meaning that the line contains quoted text
and represent that graphically.  Opera does it, it sounds like Mail.app
does it too.  But they can only work with the text that is there in
the first place.  Mail.app might have some real fuzzy logic built in
if it doesn't interpet those From lines as quoted text.

> Perhaps it's a combination of factors; I remember some mail agents give 
> you an option of how to prefix quoted messages (the >, custom 
> characters, etc.).

Yes, most do, but that setting only comes into play when you are
replying to or forwarding messages and quoting the original.  It happens
on the sending side.  The issue I'm having is that the message is altered
in transit.  It is sent without a ">" in front of the From lines, but
it arrives with a ">" in front of the From lines.

> Only other thing I could suggest would be a sniff dump of the messages 
> flying over the wire then retracing them to find out exactly what's 
> happening, or see if your MUA stores messages in a plain format that 
> can be viewed on the console and see what exactly is in them (or use a 
> hex editor on the source to see if there are non-visible characters 
> embedded in the text for formatting purposes).

That's good advice.  The mail store on this box is a Maildir folder.
The messages are stored in plain RFC822 format.  Those From lines are
indeed quoted in the mail store, so I guess I can absolve Mutt of all
wrongdoing :)  Dovecot too for that matter.

I don't have those "sniff dump of the messages flying over the wire"
smarts.  If you can recommend a tool for doing that I would appreciate
it.

Thanks for your reply.

-- 
Danny MacMillan




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