Quoting character when replying

[Kurt Hackenberg]

On 2021/02/14 23:40, Cameron Simpson wrote:

> [format=flowed] is quite conservations, to minimise the implementation burden. And
> that frugality is likely where the inflexibility about ">" comes from.


I think it's to avoid ambiguity. A line that starts with "> " could have 
been quoted that way, or the original line could have started with a 
space. This is true even without format=flowed.

Also, format=flowed does space-stuffing at the beginnings of lines, 
required for some lines, allowed on all lines, and those stuffed spaces 
are to the right of any quoting characters. A line that starts with "> " 
is interpreted as one level of quoting plus space-stuffing. See RFC 
3676, section 4.5.