[geeks] mail formatting (was Re: HD/IDE question)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 @ 09:54 -0500, Michael Parson said:

> Long lines bother me simply because I find them hard to read, regardless
> of the width of my display.  Mutt wraps them poorly, just cutting off
> your long lines and putting a + at the beginning of the next line, not
> even on word boundries.

Actually, mutt is doing what it was told to do.

The thing that is frustrating with people doing this and also using
multimedia email is that there is no real standard for any of it.

The normal way of doing this is to embed HTML and use that, but that's
not a valid email standard and is actually horrible for the job.

The problem is that in the 15 years we've been wanting to get past plain
text, *NOBODY* has come up with a sane and well-designed standard for
doing anything else.

Worse, what they have come up with is terrible, and in general people
don't want to use or create email formats that still allow the text-only
part of the message to be usable.

I've even had idiots send me email where the text was in an image.

Yeah, that did me a hell of a lot of good.

> But I deal, I have nice vi macros, so I just hit 'e' and edit the file,
> run the body of the message through par(1), use a few other macros to
> clean up the quoting and wrapping of the quoted text, exit back out,
> and read it cleanly.

I've never found any that can be updated as fast as people find new ways
to make simple things difficult.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [Well, I have entered the "metallic years." 
Silver in my hair, gold in my teeth, lead in my ass... -- Sheldon Hall in
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