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

[Graham Bleach]

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.

[Graham Bleach (graham-ubuntu)]

This mbox file displays the problem.

[Andrew McCarthy (andrewmccarthy)]

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!