On Tue, Jan 27, 2026 at 08:01:46PM -0500, Kurt Hackenberg wrote:
> 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.
The message separator is the string "\nFrom " arguably followed by additional
text which is not a newline, and then a newline. Messages which have
paragraphs in the body which start with From should do one of:
1. escape that From (ONLY if preceded by a newline)
2. Use the Content-Length header to mark where the message ends
3. Use quoted-printable encoding or some other well-known and
well-supported encoding to alleviate the need to escape the
"\nFrom " line.
If your MDA writes messages to folders without doing one of those
three things, it will fail to interoperate with well-written, robust
mailers. Mutt should not care about that.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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