Quoting James Edward Gray II <james / grayproductions.net>:

> > I don't think Google is to blame.  The gateway software is more
> > likely to be the culprit: When reading via NNTP these lines are
> > missing, too.  I guess it has something to do with lines that
> > consist only of ".".
>
> Ick.  That's not good.
>
> Naughty gateway.  ;)

It's one of those little gotchas with these old-school messaging
protocols.  In many cases, lines with single periods are
end-of-message markers.

It's rather like having to avoid starting lines that start with
From as it is also an end-of-message (or rather,
beginning-of-message) marker in certain mailbox formats.

If you're lucky, some of the software along the way will quote the
"special" strings, but everybody has slightly different rules and
nobody is consistent.

Some days I think it's amazing that this stuff works as well as it
does.

-mental