Thank you Igor for putting me onto such a facinating issue. Here I was expecting to Google a quick fix but instead stumbled onto layers and layers of debate and standards. To say this is not a browser problem is strictly correct but a gross over-simplification. As I understand it (I am not a web developer or mail administrator) the lines don't wrap because the archiver program that formats the plain text messages for pythia wraps them in <pre> tags. This is signalling that the message is preformatted text and hence is not to be formatted and wrapped (the default behavour I believe). Apparently there is a way to get Outlook to insert line feeds at a specified character length for you, so I will look into that Monday and post it. That is the quick work around, but I see this as an arbitrary mangling of the message. And adding line feeds manually seem so seventies. I see this as really a mail archiver issue. The archiver should be smart enough to recognize text that consists o! f long lines and either break it up or, much better still, wrap it in different more appropriate tags. There is a lively debate over whether to manually input carriage returns, an issue as controvertial as followers unwinding after the cross ;-). The quick quick fix is just to cut and paste the long message into wordpad or word and it will reformat fine.
Here is a really good article on the background to the problem and ways in which various standards bodies attempt to solve it (actually a really interesting site about email formatting in general): http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html Here is one guy's defence of long lines: http://www.tnlc.com/eep/wrap.html Here is some background on the relevant html: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html Anyway, sorry for the offtopic (somewhat) post and for the unreadable messages (including this one ;-)) P.S. As anyone who works in IT will tell you, never trust a developer, just love and abuse them :-). Igor wrote>It is not a browser problem. No browser will ever wrap the HTML text in a window. **************** CAUTION - Disclaimer ***************** This e-mail contains PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION intended solely for the use of the addressee(s). If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender by e-mail and delete the original message. Further, you are not to copy, disclose, or distribute this e-mail or its contents to any other person and any such actions are unlawful. This e-mail may contain viruses. Infosys has taken every reasonable precaution to minimize this risk, but is not liable for any damage you may sustain as a result of any virus in this e-mail. You should carry out your own virus checks before opening the e-mail or attachment. Infosys reserves the right to monitor and review the content of all messages sent to or from this e-mail address. Messages sent to or from this e-mail address may be stored on the Infosys e-mail system. ***INFOSYS******** End of Disclaimer ********INFOSYS*** _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
