Mail readers (was: Re: Portupgrade troubles, interactive ports)

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> 
> On Mar 17, 2004, at 5:45 PM, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 
> > 1) Please wrap your lines at 70 characters so your emails may be 
> > easily read.
> 
> I'm using Mail.app on OS X 10.3.3, and someone offering some advice 
> from this list also
> asked me to fix  line wrapping.  I checked and checked, but found 
> nothing in Mail that allows
> a "wrapping" unless it's done manually.

Yup.  I do it manually - just hit that nice big Enter/Return key between
a couple of word when I get out around that far.   Some Mail clients
allow you to set a line length and then try to break between word near
there.   Most editors such as vi allow something like this too.  I am
using vi, but have a long habit of hitting return from way back in the
days of typewriters (I'm old) so I never even bother to set anything 
in vi.    I just miss the bell 'ding' and sound of the platen or type
ball moving back each time.   Maybe that could be simulated.

> I went to the MacOSX admin mailing list and asked there.  They said 
> that the problem
> is that when Mail.app sends as "text" (I avoid whenever possible 
> sending html or
> rich text stuff through email...if it's good enough for telnet, it's 
> good enough for me! :-)
> the format is "flow" (format = flowed), and pointed me to 
> http://www.joeclark.org/ffaq.html
> for some information.  From what I understood the problem isn't 
> Mail.app, it was a
> MUA that isn't correctly reading format=flowed

That's all too complicated.  It is really because many people read
their mail on text only readers - such as on a console without 
much gui stuff or whatever.   So, the stuff either just wraps at
lousy places and runs stuff together or it ignores all the html
or other markup junk that clutters up the message file and splats 
it all out on the screen just as it gets it which is hard to read.

> Out of curiosity, what email program are you using that it's not 
> showing up?  I thought the
> FAQ said that many term emailers support the flowed 
> format...essentially my hitting
> "enter" at the end of each line is making it more difficult for the 
> format=flowed-speaking-
> mailers to correctly format my email for quoting, etc...

A return in there usuall doesn't mess up the gui Email readers.  They 
tend to ignore it.  But it sure helps text based Email readers.

////jerry

> 
> Suggestions?  I'm not trying to start any kind of religious MUA war or 
> anything like that,
> just asking for honest opinion on "best practices"...
>