Fwd: Re: formatting and addresses

[Paul Hodges]

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