Avoiding "From" in Email |
October 25th, 2017 |
| email, tech |
From ".
This is a habit I got into when it was common for mail clients to use
the "mboxo"
format. Those programs store their emails in a big text file that
looks like:
From ... From: a@example.com To: b@example.com Subject: ... Message body From ... From: a@example.com To: b@example.com Subject: ... Message body
Each time there's a line starting with the five letters
"From ", that starts a new message. If you write a message starting
with From then mboxo-using mail clients will
"munge" it, changing it to ">From ". So we might have:
From ... From: a@example.com To: b@example.com Subject: ... >From what you said yesterday I wasn't thinking you would come to dinner today? From ... From: a@example.com To: b@example.com Subject: ... Message body
Unfortunately, these clients don't also change lines starting with
">From " to ">>From " [1] which means this
change isn't reversible. So someone reading the message in their mail
client will see the munged version:
>From what you said yesterday I wasn't
thinking you would come to dinner today?
To avoid this, for years I've been trying not to start paragraphs with
"From ", though there was always some risk my email would end
up with a line starting that way due to being automatically
word-wrapped.
At this point, however, I don't think the contortions are worth it,
and I'm planning to stop worrying about it. People still using
mboxo can see unsightly from-munges, or they can move to
something using a better file format.
[1] Though some other mail clients do; we say they're using mboxrd.
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