mutt

Doesn't display lines starting "From" correctly in mbox

Bug #52899 reported by Graham Bleach
10
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
mutt
New
Unknown
mutt (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

In the mbox mailbox format it is necessary to escape lines beginning "From ", as this is the message delimiter. Standard practice is to place a ">" character at the start of the line.

mutt, however, displays these escaped lines as ">From ..."

I believe that it should not display the ">" character to the user.

Revision history for this message
Graham Bleach (graham-ubuntu) wrote :

This mbox file displays the problem.

Daniel Robitaille (robitaille)
Changed in mutt:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Andrew McCarthy (andrewmccarthy) wrote :

There's a good summary of this problem here:
http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html

There are several different, and unfortunately incompatible, mbox formats. Some of them escape "From" and some of them don't. You also can't reliably tell which you've got, and mutt seems to make use of the Content-length header if it's there. There's a lengthy discussion of this at http://dev.mutt.org/trac/ticket/714

Unless this has been causing trouble, I wouldn't worry too much about it. And if it is, I'd switch to Maildir entirely! The mutt bug has been open for 7 years, and the discussion is still going on!

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in mutt:
status: Unknown → New
To post a comment you must log in.
This report contains Public information  
Everyone can see this information.
Subscribing...

Other bug subscribers

Bug attachments

Remote bug watches

Bug watches keep track of this bug in other bug trackers.