Fwd: Re: formatting and addresses - Hodges

[Bill Wood]

On Fri, 02 Jul 1999 09:37:56 +0100, Paul Hodges wrote:

>On Thu, 01 Jul 1999 15:02:42 -0700 (PDT), Bill Wood wrote:
>
>>  There are some readers that don't reflow properly 
>
>Properly?  Actually, reflowing text is no part of any Internet mail
>standard, and reliance on it tends to break them.  There is a stated
>maximum line length of 998 characters, and anyone who writes
>paragraphs as single lines is liable to get them truncated by some
>part of the system.  Some clients don't even handle that length (it
>is a maximum, not a minimum) - for instance, Pegasus Mail until the
>recent 3.x versions truncated at 256 characters, and those older
>versions are still in widespread use.
>
>There may be arguments for changing the standard, but that is how it
>stands.  If you wish to rely on automatic reflowing, it should be
>done in your program when generating the message, not be left for the
>recipient to do.
>
>Paul Hodges
>QBS Software Ltd
>
===============

Well, this I understand. Usually I trade email with
known friends and we have no problems. I not only use
standards but occasionally I write them and generally
support their use. But clearly there is a lack of
conformance to existing standards, whatever they are,
as email on the net is a gigantic mess. All you need to
see to know this is a msg that has had multiple
forwards.

The goal, after all, is or should be to communicate
with most people as conveniently as possible, not
wasting your time or theirs. What I see many sites do
that use email commercially (eg, news sites) is to send
email formatted to relatively short lines, like the
width of one column of a 2-column news letter.

Since, as you say, one may not really know what's at
the receiving end, then the short line approach may be
best.  Conforming to a 72-charcter standard that is not
observed and in practice produces chaotic msgs doesn't
seem to be a wise course.

But this is a clunky expedient and we probably do need
some new standards. After all, if email worked well
overall we would not be having this discussion.

One last thing. The 998-character max line length seems
in practice to vary, with many at about 1024 characters
(apparently enforced by network servers??). How old is
this std? I can't imagine the need for such a
limitation today. It certainly isn't required by the
base protocols. As an example of how well these stds
are known, I had a discourse with Ike about this one
several months ago, and he'd never heard of it, he
said.


w3

Bill Wood
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Las Vegas,  89149-6499

702.658.0718
wwwood@lv.rmci.net

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