Top post [was Re: [OT] [oclug] Mandrake]

[Rod Giffin]

Michael P. Soulier said:
> On 18/11/03 Rod Giffin did speaketh:
>
>> Oh, I don't know.  It seems to me that a message should be able to be
>> formatted for the device that's using it.  Even 72 character line
>> wraps are ineffective in some PDA and other devices.  That some e-mail
>> clients can't handle lines that don't have carriage returns inserted
>> that weren't typed by the user is actually a defect in the client
>> software, not the senders.
>
>     I don't think it's that they can't handle them. I know Mutt wraps
> the lines. But, when I reply, the > char is put at the beginning of a
> line that wraps 5 times. Thanks to Vim's gq command, it's easy to fix,
> but I shouldn't have to.

Yes that can happen, in fact it's maybe not the e-mail client that is
defective, but the paradigm that e-mail is currently using.  It should not
be up to the senders software to format the e-mail stream for the
recipient.  The recipient's device should do the formatting, including
maintaining quoted sections, and present it to the user in the best
possible format for the circumstances.

XMTP anyone?
<ducking>
  I'm not advocating a solution, just pointing out that
  the problem has been recognized for a while.
</ducking>

>     Plus, if you put in hard returns a > 80 chars, it shows up in my
> terminal like this.

Oh, I know.  But that's what happens if people continue to use broken
e-mail clients that don't wrap the lines at all, then complain about
e-mail with no carriage returns.  Nobody is going to sit there and count
out 72 characters just to insert the carriage return at the right place. 
They just guess at where they should go.

[snip]
>     Then there's HTML mail. That wonderful technology that's been oh so
> helpful to spammers world-wide.

Yes, well HTML mail via SMTP was simply a very bad idea, and unfortunately
it set a rather big prescident.

Rod.