xml-dev - Re: admin:more odd filtering

[Paul Fidler <praf1@cam.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> David Megginson wrote last week that he was getting odd characters in some
> messages. I hadn't seen it until this morning, when one of my own messages
> suddenly sported an extra ">", thereby making one of my lines look like a
> quote. ...

> Any ideas why this is happening?

Unix mailboxes generally consist of a concatenation of a whole lot of mail
messages separated by lines that start "From ". Unfortunately this means
it isn't possible to have a line beginning "From " in the body of the
message, so MTAs and things using unix format mail folders change it to
">From ".

Nothing ever converts it back to "From " since it isn't possible to tell
the difference between a ">From " that should be a "From " and a genuine
quoted ">From ".

eg. The next line starts "From ". The line after it starts ">From ":
>From here I can see the sea.
>From here I can see the sea.

But they will probably look identical by the time this message
leaves the machine I'm writing this on.


Paul Fidler
-- 
Cambridge University Engineering Department
Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1PZ, UK 



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