I guess the poor folks who see this topic go by every few months when new
users come on and try to sort out this topic must be getting a bit tired
of not having a searchable archive that they can point people to.
However, I have something to add to what's been said:
>
>Well... but does Outlook merely undo the breaks behind the scenes and
>give you an appearance of having control over it?
I checked, and the only actual setting I could find in Outlook was to set
wrapping of outgoing messages. Maybe it was Netscape that allowed me to
set wrapping of incoming messages? It's still on this machine, so let me
see... Yes, Netscape Communicator 4.75 lets me toggle wrapping incoming
messages to the window width, and requires that I set a value for
wrapping outgoing messages, though this can be anything greater than 1,
it seems (it accepted 999).
>
>The following was the message I was thinking of (Dan Webb, "line width
>limit"):
>-----
>>>> Run some tests with other clients. I think you'll be surprised at how
>>>> many mail relays have 78 as a hard limit, thus you never see what you
>>>> intended the input to be.
I would find it very unusual that a mail _relay_ would do anything to the
content of an email message at all. The headers, sure, but not the content.
>Also here; interesting... (somewhere in the same thread):
>-----
>>
>>True, this issue is more complex than I thought. I did some
experimentation:
>>
[...]
>>
>>- Sending from Outlook to PM: PM is able to open the URL because it was
>>composed as an HTML email message and PM (presumably) converted it to
>>plain text, preserving the URL.
That's interesting.
>>
>>- Sending plain text from Outlook to PM: PM is unable to open the URL
>>because it is hard-wrapped and is not surrounded by angle brackets.
But how is Outlook set up? It does have a setting for wrapping outgoing
messages. Hang on, I've got both machines right here. I'll try. Aha!
If I set the wrapping to longer than the URL (the max is 132), it works
fine. If I set it shorter, the URL is cut and doesn't work.
Interestingly, I can't disable the wrapping in Outlook, just extend it to
132 characters. Powermail did not wrap the long URL when it came it. If
I go to forward the message, the URL is already wrapped, before I even
send the message.
>
>Not done yet! hehe... Wayne Brissette made this note ("Word/Line wrapping
>- can it be disabled?"):
>-----
[...]
>>
>>Word wrapping cannot be disabled. As much as people think a mail client
>>controls it, the mail client doesn't. See RFC 822
>>
>><http://www.tac.nyc.ny.us/cgi-bin/rfc?822>.
>-----
>
>I'm guessing section 3.4.8 on page 15 of that RFC.
>
Hmmm. I don't read RFC 822 that way at all. It says that long _header_
lines _may_ be folded, but explicitly says that the format of the
_content_ of a message is not covered. On the contrary, RFC 822
explicitly says that formatting (including folding) of the content isn't
part of the standard at all! Of course, a more recent RFC might have
something else to say (822 is from 1982).
I'm not convinced that folding is required, and my own judgement says it
shouldn't be so that the receiving client can be set to display however
you want. I'll see if I can dig up some of the more recent relevant RFCs.
--
Raúl Vera
Director
Orbit 3 Pty Ltd
8 Coneill Place
NSW 2037
Australia
