On Tuesday 05 February 2008 20:14:47 Norman Dunbar wrote: > Hi Wolfgang, > > > "Difficulty" is too much of a word. It arrived here as separate lines, > > but the lines don't linewrap, so I scroll a lot. > > Spookily enough, your email to me is one long line as well. I've never > suffered from this before until David raised the 'fault' with my email > all being one single long paragraph - which it so far appears that he is > the only one who is having thins problem. > > Wonder what's going on?
Email was initially designed before fonts and fancy control characters. We had 64 different characters if we were lucky (some only had uppercase). The all was Unix based, a time with no mice and Telex was the future before fax. This is why Base64 encoding exists which is often seen with uuencode/uudecode. Everything was sent as text characters and we hard coded carriage returns for the 80 column displays. This caused problems with reply text where the reply indicators could cause the end of every line to be dropped form the display. The world moves on and we now have HTML/MIME encoding for fonts, other character sets and formating information. Word wrapping is normally done automatically by your MUA and has nothing to do with the MTA. Hard text encoding can cause problems with wrapping especially when changing between HTML enabled systems and text systems multiple times. Typically, I see it on systems that are unable to automatically adjust text when it inserts the previous reply indicator "> " before being encoded on the way out. * If everyone uses HTML encoded text then the message is automatically wrapped. * If everyone is using Plain Text encoding then no problems occur * If someone send in Plain Text some HTML readers can fail to wrap if not completely configured correctly. Now while it may seem ideal for everyone to switch to HTML encoded text only or Plain text only, the real solution would be to fix the MUA's to wrap Plain Text correctly. There are good reasons for allowing plain text encoding (Mailing lists typically do not support it. HTML/MIME is larger, Not everyone uses your software, poorly designed operating systems are vulnerable to viruses and encoded email is a common carrier, visually impaired users may have set their software to use colours and fonts suitable for their use and your overwriting HTML/MIME encoded file will overwrite this, it risks breaking mailbox sizes etc,). <FLAMEon>Now from the above you might be able to read that I am not overly fond of MS software (although I seem to have bought a copy of every version over the years). However, while I have excellent reasons for not using it, I understand others may not have an option or they may even choose to use it. That is their prerogative. In a similar fashion, I hope they understand that not everyone uses Word files. :-) </FLAMEon> For the poor souls on Outlook the registry key is HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Office\nnn\Common\MailSettings (Where nnn is the version of Outlook (2007=12.0, 2003=11.0, 2002=10.0) With the DWords InternetMailTextEncoding and WrapLinesDWORD John _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
