tlug: MTA's that change "From" to ">From" in mail messages

[Selva Nair <selva@example.com>]

My sendmail[*] changes all lines starting with "From " in the message
body to ">From ". Nothing new, and I had accepted this as a kind
of standard, though it was a major irritant while sending tex files as a
part of the message especially in those good old pre-mime days ..
(tex formats ">" into nice inverted question mark, something not hard to
spot..)

Today I got a multipart mime message with a tex file included as

Content-Type: application/x-tex;
 name="Lopr3.tex"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Disposition: inline;
 filename="Lopr3.tex"          


Again, all lines starting with a From where mangled by, I think, my
sendmail as some other recipients got it without any corruption. 

So the question is, what do the standards say? RFC 821 does not appear
to mention anything of that kind, while what I could glean from RFC1521
appears to indicate that conforming MTA's are not supposed to do that... 

Thanks in advance,

Selva

[*] Now that all the tlug fishing gurus seems to have become security
buffs as well -- unfortunately I couldn't attend the weekend lecture--
let me keep my sendmail version a secret... Oh, no, dont look at the
header fields ;)


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