Internet protocols and formats are native to Unix, which is closely intermarried with C (programming language). Backslash character is used to prevent the following character from being interpreted in the normal way. Within a string delimited by quotation marks, \" is used to indicate an actual quote character. Two backslashes are used to indicate one backslash. That's why backslashes occasionally appear in message header lines such as
From: "Samuel\"my_nickname\"Heywood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Removing the backslashes would mean having quotes within a quoted string, messing up the syntax. Software I use would not send a message with a header line like From: "Samuel (my_nickname) Heywood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> but it might work if each parenthesis is preceded with a backslash; I haven't tried. Once I received a message with a line like the one above, couldn't send with a line created by simply changing From: to To: , I had to remove the parentheses, didn't try the backslash trick. I didn't check the RFC on this matter. I sent this a few days ago, but it apparently vanished in the cyber ether when the Arachne list went down.
