Re: mbox quoting (was: Re: Gnus, movemail, POP3, trailing empty lines)

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

Greg Stark <gsstark@MIT.EDU> writes:

> you lose compatibility with an enormous number of other clients

You don't lose compatibility with any software.  The algorithm will
work on any syntactically correct mbox, and produce a syntactically
correct mbox.  All existing tools will continue to work.

The two cases are:

(1) When software using the old algorithm is used on mboxes created by
the new algorithm, no additional damage is done.

(2) When software using the new algorithm is used on mboxes created by
the old algorithm, the result is usually, but not always, better or
equal to what software using the old algorithm would produce.

Conclusion:  

(a) The new algorithm doesn't corrupt new messages, protect them
against damage corruption by old clients, and usually work better on
already corrupted mboxes.

(b) The old algorithm corrupts old messages, and doesn't work very
well on already corrupted mboxes, but at least doesn't inflict further
damage on uncorrupted mboxes.

> If you really dislike this little wart in the mbox format use babyl,

BABYL is even more broken than mbox.  BABYL doesn't escape its
delimiter at all.