Re: Gnus capitalizes non-header "from"

[Lars-Johan Liman]

eric@ericabrahamsen.net:
> asjo@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren) writes:

>> Christoph writes:
>> 
>>> The bug occurs when I send an email message with an attachment that is a
>>> Python source file.  Lines in that file that begin with "from" (or
>>> perhaps just the first such line), get capitalized, as if they were a
>>> SMTP header.  For an example see the message [1] that I've just sent to
>>> a mailing list.
>> 
>> Are you sure Gnus is the program mangling it? It is mangled in your
>> sent-folder?
>> 
>> I just tried emailing myself an attachment and "from" was untouched -
>> both in the copy in the sent-folder and the one I received through my
>> local Postfix. (I tried both with disposition=attachment and inline,
>> same result).

> FWIW, I tried it, and the "from" was capitalized in both the received
> and sent version.

(Without having gone through your testing, and not knowing to which
detail you're familiar with the mail standards, so please excuse is this
is too basic:)

This can possibly boil down to the old e-mail standard for the "mailbox"
format - the old local storage format for incoming mail to a user
(typically in /var/(spool/)mail/liman (in my case). In those files,
messages are separated by a "From ...." line (no colon! not header!),
and in order to not mistake a text line starting with "From " for a
message separator, all "From " lines in a message had to be "quoted",
typically with a ">" leading to text like this:

   text text text text text text text text text text 
   text text text text text text text text text text 

   >From this day on, I had to write everything using the
   Comic Sans font, and I was very upset with my editor ...

Mail user agents typically convert this back to "From ..." when showing
a message, but as you undoubtedly realise, there is ample room for
mistakes here. One bug is to also "quote" lower case "from ..." to
">from ..." or even ">From ...", and/or when converting back make
another mistake ">from ..." --> "From ...".

One way around this could be to see whether you can append your Python
code as something else than "text/plain", and have it encoded in
Quoted-Printable (or even BASE64), which ought to eliminate the
problem. (Q-P encoding would lead to "From ..." --> "=70rom ...", if I
remember the standard correctly, which I probably don't ;-).

Then again, I could be completely off here. I usuaslly am ... ;-)

                                Cheers,
                                  /Liman
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