For many years I have made it my practice to set up my e-mail clients so that when I forward e-mails I forward them as attachments rather than forwarding them "inline".
I did this because, in the past, often when I forwarded e-mail an intervening e-mail server would escape certain lines. For example, if the message I was forwarding contained a line starting with "From"
the server would change this to ">From"
in order that the line not be confused with the From e-mail header. This caused serious problems for me, especially when the content contained TeX source code.
So, to avoid this sort of problem I always made sure to forward as an attachment.
There is one big downside to this, though: the mail server that delivers my mail has a very touchy virus-scanner and practically every e-mail that I forward to my colleagues gets marked ###POSSIBLE VIRUS###
. Some of the messages never get through as my colleagues filter out messages they think are dangerous.
My question is this: Are modern-day mail servers smart enough not to do this escaping? I checked and my local mail server no longer escapes these lines. But what about other mail servers? I realize this is a fuzzy question, but I need a sense of how big a problem this still is.