Flowed text
Norman Gray
norman.gray at glasgow.ac.uk
Mon Jun 15 09:46:26 UTC 2020
Greetings,
On 14 Jun 2020, at 23:45, Kurt Hackenberg wrote:
> Or a message could contain information about whether lines should be
> filled and word-wrapped. Like this message you're reading, for
> example. It's text/plain format=flowed (RFC 3676).
A (tangential) problem is that not only is this MIME parameter only
incompletely supported in mail clients (as Kurt notes), but the
parameter might not survive going through an MTA.
The email client I use does set format=flowed on outgoing text/plain
emails, but when I cc myself, that comes back to me via an Exchange
server, which (at some point in the message's labyrinthine passage
through the server) strips or replaces the content-type header, losing
the format=flowed. This seems straightforwardly an error, but when I
reported it to local mail admins, they were sympathetic, but also
realistic about how far down their priority list fixing it, or reporting
it upstream, would be.
They found an interesting blog-post by a webmail provider on the topic:
<https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/17/format-flowed/>, which I think sums up
the situation rather well.
The situation is disappointing, but I find it hard to work up much real
outrage at it.
Best wishes,
Norman
--
Norman Gray : http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/it/
Research IT Coordinator
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
Charity number SC004401
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