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Re: imap-send badly handles commit bodies beginning with "From <"

From
Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date
Nov 1, 2011, 16:14 UTC
Message-ID
<20111101161412.GA7796@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To
<4EB01918.8080604@alum.mit.edu>
On Tue, Nov 01, 2011 at 05:06:48PM +0100, Michael Haggerty wrote:
Show 9 quoted lines
> On 11/01/2011 04:38 PM, Jeff King wrote:
> > Right. If you properly quote and unquote "From " lines, then mbox can be
> > unambiguous.
> 
> That is not quite true.  The RFC says only that lines matching "^From "
> should be quoted, not lines matching "^>From " (or, generally, "^>*From
> ").  So the quoting is lossy; it is *not* possible to tell whether a
> line starting with ">From " should be unquoted (it could have been
> ">From " in the original).

That was what I meant by "properly". Note that the second link Magnus mentioned (and which is referred to in the RFC in the paragraph immediately following the discussion of "from" quoting) discusses this explicitly.

The real issue with mbox is not that it can't be done well, but that you have no clue which variant the writing end used. In practice, it works OK because it's simple and those corner cases just don't come up much (at least for a reasonably defensive reader).

-Peff
Previous: Michael Haggerty
Message 8 of 8 in “imap-send badly handles commit bodies beginning with "From <"”
  1. Andrew EikumOct 28, 2011
  2. Jeff KingOct 28, 2011
  3. Andrew EikumOct 28, 2011
  4. Jeff KingOct 28, 2011
  5. Magnus BäckOct 30, 2011
  6. Jeff KingNov 1, 2011
  7. Michael HaggertyNov 1, 2011
  8. Jeff KingNov 1, 2011

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