Flowed text

[Polytropon]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 10:46:20 +0100, Norman Gray wrote:
> 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.

A few years ago, I visited a company office where they used
a combination of "Outlook" and "Exchange" and even had their
own "mail admins" to support this construct. Strangely, every
message sent through this construct became mangled in a very
unpleasant way: the time was changed, the timezone was changed,
and all message content was collapsed into one line (spaces and
tabs became a space, newlines became a space). So messages
always looked like this:

Yes. Original Message From: Bob <bob at example.con> To: Joe <joe at example.com> CC: Management <management-list at example.com> Subject Re: AW: Re: AW: Re: AW: AW: Re: Re: Re: Meeting on Tuesday Date Mon, 15 Jun 2018 00:20:10 +0000 Should wwe arrange the meeting at 14:00 or at 15:00? What do you think? Tony suggested we talk also talk about -Foo -Bar -Baz Please verify with Karen! Original Message From: Joe <joe at example.con> To: Bob <bob at example.com> CC: Management <management-list at example.com> Subject AW: Re: AW: Re: AW: AW: Re: Re: Re: Meeting on Tuesday Date Mon, 15 Jun 2018 00:14:31 +0000 Samantha from accounting dept. wants to know if she is supposed to attend the meeting Mit freundlichen Grüße / Kind regards, Joe Q. Sixpack M.B.A. -- ABCDE Stupid Title Office Director 2nd Class The Example Company GmbH & Co. KG Businessing since 1995 Excellence office Certified ISO-9660 Boring corporate signature

Instead of fixing the problem - obviously something was wrong
with the configuration of their "mailing system", they invented
a workaround that wasn't exactly good, but worked so well that
everyone in the office had adapted it: They printed (!) the
messages, took colored markers to highlight the relevant names
and content, and then wrote their reply, leading to a new "message
line" prefixed with their answer (where the reply looked normal
in their composer window, but was added infront of the "message
line" for all recipients). After a few weeks, nobody found that
their solution, while working, was _not_ what you were supposed
to do in such a case, i. e., talk to the "mail admins" and make
them do their job. On every desk, there were binders and stacks
of printed and colored emails...

I bet they still praise their "paperless office" today. :-)

To summarize:

Sometimes, the right thing to do is to complain, and demand the
responsible parties to do their fscking job, than to ignore it
and learn to live with broken workarounds.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...