Message format *again* (was: Why mplayer in FreeBSD 5.1 behave not so good as Debian in my computer?)

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Sep 27), Greg 'groggy' Lehey said:
> [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html]
> On Friday, 26 September 2003 at 14:26:38 -0500, Eugene Lee wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 04:48:49AM -0700, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> >>
> >> 1) Please wrap your lines at 70 characters so your emails may be
> >> easily read
> >
> > Just curious, is "format=flowed" disallowed here?
> 
> I don't see anything in the standards that defines this format, so I
> suppose the answer should be "yes".  On a more practical basis, I
> don't know of any UNIX-based MUA which treats this correctly, and
> none of the messages I looked at it had this attribute.  In addition,
> I can't see how "format=flowed" can distinguish between computer
> output (which should be quoted unchanged, possibly with very long
> lines) and text, which RFC 2822 recommends to be 78 characters or
> less.  It also makes it almost impossible to quote.
>
> So yes, it's "disallowed" in the sense that it's discouraged, and
> that a number of people, myself included, tend to delete such
> messages unread.  Follow the URL below for more details.

RFC2646 defines format=flowed, and does a pretty good job of explaining
the wrapping, joining, and quoting rules.

The nice thing about correctly-generated format=flowed text is that it
looks just like regular text, so a MUA that doesn't understand flowed
text can still display perfectly readable output.  Paragraphs are
wrapped at 72 chars, and a trailing space is added at the wrap point as
a hint that the next line is a logical continuation.  Lines not ending
in a space are not flowed, so it's easy to specify what text will be
flowed and what won't.

I'd use it myself if I can ever get around to hacking joe's
paragraph-reformat function to add the trailing spaces..

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com