On Tue, Jan 27, 2026 at 08:41:57PM +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
This version accepts any From line that starts with "From " (as long as
it has something afterwards.)
I don't know Mutt's code that reads mbox, so I'm probably missing
something, but...does something else keep that from accepting an
unescaped message line that starts with "From "?
I know of two variants of mbox that don't use Lines: or
Content-Length:, and do ">From " escaping of only some message lines,
not all of them.
One of them was used in Berkeley Unix, and probably its descendants. It
escapes a message "From " line only if it's preceded by an empty line.
For example, it would do this:
From [email protected] Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 (UTC)
>From the beginning, mbox damaged messages.
From the beginning, mbox damaged messages.
The other is written by the old, obscure mail reader VM, written in
Emacs Lisp. It escapes only message lines that match
^From .*[0-9]$
