Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 05:53:20 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The Stupid Virus going arround. Message-ID: <15364.53296.760655.58854@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <56069522@toto.iv>
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Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com> types: > Louis LeBlanc (leblanc+freebsd@keyslapper.org) wrote: > > Mutt allows you to use emacs, vi, or vim as your composer/viewer, in > > addition to the no frills (even compared to vi) builtin composer. You > > can even configure it to color certain text to indicate headers, > > quotes, addresses, etc., just by tweaking a mail.vim config. > While we're on the subject of editor/mail user agent interactions: > What is it that causes all lines in the message body beginning with the > word 'From' to be indented with a '>'?? That's a Unixism. The original Unix mail program prepended a line to each message to indicate the start of the message. The mail reader from that era looked for those lines when parsing a mailbox into message. The lines looked something like [pause to watch the Disk meter on gkrellm while my find grovels over my mail archives] this: From mwm Thu, 18 Nov 93 23:12:14 PST To prevent mail user agents from incorrectly finding the start of a message inside a message, any line that started "From " was translated to ">From " before delivery. Idealy, such mechanisms are removed before the user sees them, but that doesn't always happen. For more information, find a copy of "The Unix-Haters Handbook". No, let me change that - to become a more informed person, *read* a copy of "The Unix-Haters Handbook". Find out all the things that Unix did wrong that it's predecessors did right, and why Unix sucks. If you can't find the book - because the original owners are unwilling to loan them out, but will let you look at their Unix Barf Bag, you can read parts of it at <URL: http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/handbook.html >. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Q: How do you make the gods laugh? A: Tell them your plans. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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