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

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 06:27:22AM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> From: "Jonathan C. Patschke" <jp at celestrion.net>
>> Date: 2006/09/26 Tue PM 08:21:42 CDT
>> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>> Subject: Re: [geeks] HD/IDE question
>
>> On Tue, 26 Sep 2006, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>>
>>>> How come your email comes across in multi-hundred character lines?
>>>
>>> Because your mail client doesn't break them up. I don't impose
>>> a line limit on my emails, I defer to your choosen mail client,
>>> window, size, etc...
>>
>> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt
>
> First off, that someone sat down and wrote a 12 page document becuase
> he was annoyed at line length in text emails is (somewhat) amazing to
> me...
>
> Second, I have changed email clients (at times I've used Outlook, at
> other times my ISP webmail client - currently using my ISP webmail
> client), so the differences may be there...
>
> Finally, I don't consider that RFC binding, as far as I am concerned
> that RFC has way too much logic in it for such a simple problem. It
> essentially says that I should specify "flow" in a header field, and
> that I "should" limit line length to between 72 and 79 characters,
> and that based on the header line setting ("flow" or "fixed") any
> client that gets my email and can not handle lines between 72 and
> 79 characters in lenght will apply the rules laid out in the RFC to
> attempt to display the message in a "sane" manner... Couldn't that all
> be resolved by the viewer including a wrap/no-wrap setting for email
> display?

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.

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.

> Finally, just to cite another RFC:
>
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

Not exactly a solution to our 'problem,' now is it? ;)

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org