Aaron Toponce wrote: > On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 03:24:38PM +0100, Chris Burdess wrote: > > I would think that it doesn't actually matter whether mutt does this or > > not, since any intervening MTAs are free to do this as they want. As > > long as the result is valid RFC822, header whitespace may be changed or > > whatever. Only the values are significant. > > I certainly agree. I guess I'm more or less curious why <tab> is being > replaced by <space>- what the logical argument is. Is the <tab> character > not a valid character in mail header fields as defined by the RFCs?
It is totally equivalent to the space character in that situation (which is called "LWSP-char" in the specification). That is, they are interchangeable with no syntactic or semantic loss. I guess that space has a very minor advantage over tab in this role, which is that in a text editor that may convert tabs to a series of spaces, additional spaces would be considered to be part of the field body contents and not the LWSP-char. So it's safer if you ever intend to edit the whole RFC822 message in such an editor. Otherwise, it's much of a muchness.
