Yesterday, John Abreau gleaned this insight:
> Derek Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > Anyone besides me notice that if you start a line of an e-mail message
> > with the word "From" your mailer sticks a '>' in front of it? This is to
> > prevent sendmail et. al. from seeing this as the start of another
> > message...
> >
> > This is all well and good, but I wish they'd have picked a character other
> > than the one that generally is used to indicate quoted text... It
> As I recall, the >From came first, and the convention of using > to quote
> when replying was taken explicitly from that, on the assumption that
> users were already familiar with the >From quote and would implicitly
> understand it. Remember that the 'Net was a lot more techie in the '70s.
Oh! Well that's different then... except it isn't. My point remains; it
would be nice if the characters used for each function were different.
Maybe a '-' for the From line quoting or something. The order of their
first usage is largely irrelevant. But then again, I'm just whining about
something that really doesn't matter, so I'll shut up now. :)
--
PGP/GPG Public key at http://cerberus.ne.mediaone.net/~derek/pubkey.txt
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Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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