[acidx]

Details are hazy as this was a long time ago, but at some point you could make parts of messages not render in Outlook and Outlook Express by writing "begin something" (two spaces after "begin") by itself in a single line. Outlook would thing that it was the start of an uuencoded block and not render anything after that.

I remember annoying friends in a mailing list by quoting emails with "begin quote from Person Name:" :)

[gpderetta]

Yes! And I remember that the official recommendation from MS was "do not write begin at the start of a line".

[gitgud]

So MS recommended to “stop using the word begin at the beginning of a new line”… insanity

I would love to see a link for this, blows my mind!

[ale42]

Typical MS...

[coldpie]

The unix mbox format uses the sequence ["F", "r", "o", "m", " "] as its indicator that a new mail has started. If you're not careful about escaping your stored mails, you can easily corrupt them by starting a body paragraph with the word "From".

How do you escape the word From? Well, that's up to the client! Be careful using different clients for a given mbox file!

Email sucks :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

[anthk]

That's why I switched to maildir long ago. Also, parsing mbox is dog slow with current mailboxes.

[phicoh]

The fun part is that the actual uuencode format has the file mode in octal after the word begin. Somebody at microsoft decided this was optional and that begin with two spaces and then the filename should also be the start of a uuencoded section. Of course also without checking if there was any content that was actually encode in that format.