>>>It seems that I am able to receive and launch the long URL's I get, but
>>>if I then forward that same message on to a colleague it's getting parsed
>>>up into separate lines at their end. I have tried putting <brackets>
>>>around the string but this is not helping.
>>
>>I think someone commented before that no matter what lines get cut to 78
>>or 80 (?) characters as e-mail makes its way through the internet
>>machinery. It depends on the mail program at the end to ignore the added
>>breaks and make the link workable.
>>
>Not quite. The "internet machinery" does nothing of the sort. Either
>the sending email client (in this case, Powermail) or the receiving email
>client (the colleague's email client) is inserting hard line breaks into
>the forwarded message, without regard for preserving the integrity of URLs.
>
>On other emailers I've used, Outlook for example, one can modify the
>behaviour of wrapping (display only, insert hard wraps on incoming, wrap
>on outgoing, etc.). I know that when set to wrap incoming messages,
>Outlook will happily cut a URL in two, then proceed to highlight the
>first half at display time when it recognises it as a URL. This is quite
>irritating, but hey, it is Outlook. I have never heard of an email
>client that would eat up line endings in order to reconstitute a URL it
>assumed was broken, as there is no foolproof way to know when a URL ends.
> The brackets you see in Powermail are specific to Powermail, presumably
>to show you what it thinks is a URL on an incoming message, making it
>clearer when something has caused the URL to break.
Well... but does Outlook merely undo the breaks behind the scenes and
give you an appearance of having control over it?
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 usually try to keep my message within 65 - 70 line length.
>>But there are occasions when I want to break the rule. I know what
>>I'm doing (or so I think.)
>
>I agree. It makes sending a long URL practically impossible. Some other
>email clients are able to handle long URLs without breaking them into
>useless chunks. I would really like to see this hard-wrapping behavior
>configurable.
>
>Dan
-----
Also here; interesting... (somewhere in the same thread):
-----
>>>I agree. It makes sending a long URL practically impossible. Some other
>>>email clients are able to handle long URLs without breaking them into
>>>useless chunks. I would really like to see this hard-wrapping behavior
>>>configurable.
>>
>>I think you are a bit confused with the issue.
>>Some other mail client may handle hyper-link double-clickable even when
>>wrapped, while PM can not. Either way, there is no way of sending long
>>non-wrapped hyper-link without formatting with MIME. It's now PM but the
>>way it is.
>
>True, this issue is more complex than I thought. I did some experimentation:
>
>- Sending from PM to PM, the URL is hard-wrapped but still double-
>clickable because of the surrounding angle brackets. If I strip off the
>angle brackets, it's not double-clickable.
>
>- Sending from PM to Outlook on PC: Outlook is unable to open the URL
>because of the hard-wrapping.
>
>- 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.
>
>- 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.
>
>Clearly, some industry standardization would help here.
-----
Not done yet! hehe... Wayne Brissette made this note ("Word/Line wrapping
- can it be disabled?"):
-----
>>Does anyone know if/how word wrapping can be turned off for sending
>>messages via Powermail? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
>>
>Wow.. I feel like this is a deja vu all over again...
>
>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.
Chris
--
