>Here's a queston: why is "From" always quoted with a > if it appears on
>the first column of an email message?  Can't SMTP servers distinguish
>between "From" in the header section and "From" in the body of the
>message?

It's to prevent people from inserting fake header lines in the body of
the email that might fool mail readers into thinking that a new mail
message has started. This would allow people to inject spurious messages
into a recipient's mailbox.  Mail items are not generally (before
Content-Length, and that is not universally liked) length delimited so
the only clue that a mail reader has that a new item has started are the
header lines.  Admittedly the check is very crude, it just looks for
From<space> and doesn't see if the rest of the line is a legal mbox From
line which a smarter mail reader could examine.


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