[Mailman-Users] Word Wrap

[Barry Finkel]

On 8/17/2009, Adrean Clark (cs at clercscar.com) wrote:
> Also notice in the first sentence of the article a > sign was added.
> It's not in the original -- where did that come from? Thanks for all
> your help.
>
> ...
>
> >From Little Girls Point, we headed ...

This is standard MBOX formatting rules.  The beginning of each mail
message in an mbox-formatted file has this

     From user at example.com Mon Jul 27 20:15:30 2009

The first five characters in this line are

     "From "

This separates this message from the one above it.  I do not
remember if there needs to be a null or blank line before this
separator line.  Because of this, any line in the body of the mail
that begins with "From " (note the upper-case "F") must be changed
so that the line does not get treated as an mbox-separator line.
The convention is to prefix the line with ">", as you saw.  A
blank character would have also worked.

Note that persons frequently post problems with creating/re-building
a Mailman list archive.  These problems sometimes are caused by
"From " lines that are not separators but which have not been modified
per the mbox "standard".

Also note that this is not a "word wrap" problem, as implied in the
"Subject" line.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994