R. David Murray <rdmur...@bitdance.com> added the comment:

It's not clear to me that this is a valid bug.  It is true that the RFC says 
that a blank line preceeds the body.  However, the line in question is not a 
valid header line.  Mail parsers trying to implement the "be liberal in what 
you accept" portion of Postel's law should parse messages that where the blank 
line between the headers and body is missing.  With the input given, there are 
three valid Postel interpretations: the body starts at the >From line, the 
>From line is missing a folding indent and is part of the value of the 
preceding header, and the >From line is garbage and should be discarded.

Since a leading >From is a token that occurs validly with reasonable frequency 
in message bodies and is never valid in message headers, I think the current 
choice is a sane one.  A smarter heuristic might look at the subsequent line 
and note that they look like headers, but headers can occur in the body of 
messages, so that heuristic would probably be wrong more often than it was 
right.  Especially considering that putting headers in a message body is the 
time when you are most likely to see the leading '>From ' token, since it would 
be quoting the mbox 'From ' header.

So, I'm closing this bug as rejected.  (Rejected rather than invalid, since 
reasonable people can certainly disagree about the best heuristics for handling 
invalid data.)

----------
resolution:  -> rejected
stage: unit test needed -> committed/rejected
status: open -> closed

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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue1443866>
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