P3D Re: PSSP talk: barriers to entry

["Gregory J. Wageman" <gjw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dr. T. writes:

>Mike and others... I have noticed that the symbol ">" is sometimes inserted
>by the server at the beginning of just one sentence in a message to the
>list.  I have no idea why this is happening.  In my original message
>there was no ">".

The addition of the ">" character is required by the RFC for SMTP mailers.
It's there to "escape" the word "From" in the message text, which is also
an SMTP header, when it begins in column one and is followed by text. This
prevents it from being misinterpreted as the start of a new message header.
For example, none of the following lines originally have ">" on them:

>From the halls of Montezuma
from far and wide
From

The mailer will add ">" to the first example, but not to either of the
others, the second because it isn't capitalized and the third because
no text follows.

	-Greg W. (gjw@xxxxxxxxxx)


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