Email Line Lengths

[Michael Baum]

Dear me.

It doesn't take much to push people right over the edge into personal
attack, does it? Perhaps it has something to do with the somewhat flat,
nuance-free nature of email text that makes everything come across as
more brusque than need be.

1. Mr. Lamb: I'm sorry formatting email by paragraph rather than line
breaks your color-coding for quotes. Must be quite annoying. In the
long run, I think it would be better if the email client could adjust
better, but I'll grant you that I don't see any easy way to do that
without at the least introducing yet another "standard" such as a way
to bracket quotes. And in the long run we're all dead, as Keynes
allegedly said.

2. Lamb>    There is a limit on the length of a line, IIRC, on SMTP
servers.
Wood>	First, the internet itself (mail server?) limits mail line
length to approximately 1000 bytes then it inserts a hard return and a
few spaces. Nobody seems to remember why this is done, but it is. Thus
your paragraphs should not exceed 1000 characters.

Thank you, I didn't know that. That's a pretty good reason to go to a
fixed-length line. Though once again, in the long run it would be
better to change the limitation.

3. Mr. Bowring:
Bowring>>>3. The many mailers that will wrap the text that you send
means
>>>   that oddly formatted, hard to read lines are produced like:
Me>>On third or fourth resending, maybe, but this isn't the fault of my
original format.
Bowring>No, on the first sending, and yes it is the fault of your
formatting!

As it read this exchange between us, you seem to be telling me that
many email clients, when they receive an arbitrarily long string like
one of my notorious 300+ character paragraphs -- on the _first
sending_, as you say -- will wrap the text in such a way as to produce
a series of lines of drastically varying length. (I've omitted your
example to say space.) Frankly, I can't imagine why that would be. It
would seem that the author of the client program would have to go to
some not inconsiderable trouble (calls to a random number routine?) to
do such uneven wrapping. Why would one code that in? Are you quite sure
of this?

As an aside, if you are going to use this list to post your reply to a
note that I sent to you privately -- which you can do, of course -- it
would be nice if you copied it in its entirety so that other readers
can evaluate your judgment that I am, umm, what was it?
Bowring>discourteous at best, and damned bloody minded and rude at
worst.

As I recall, I thanked you for your information at least twice and in
between thank-yous offered arguments counter to your arguments. They
weren't all that bad. I added a line to soften the tone a bit (I
observed earlier how harsh these email texts can sound), and you leaped
on it to tell me that I was "playing games." All in all, you found my
note ignorant and rude. I have to conclude that you spend much of your
time being insulted and offended?

4. Mr. Nuytens:
Nuytens>Ignoring standards that have been in place for longer than
you've
Nuytens>probably been alive, just because you "feel like it", is
arrogant and
Nuytens>selfish.

I don't see that a person's age has anything in particular to do with
the validity of their arguments in this case. And I didn't take the
position I did "just because I feel like it". Perhaps you didn't read
my original message. I think paragraph-based formatting is a better
approach over all. Or would be save perhaps for the arguments by Lamb
and Wood at 1 and 2, supra, which are pretty good.  Particularly 2.

Ibid.>"Since I don't know the right thing to do, I'll just ridicule the
Ibid.>existing standard and to hell with everyone else."

This is obviously some meaning of "standard" with which I am
unacquainted. No specific line length seems to be enforced by the mail
protocols save the ~1000 byte limit that Mr. Wood cites, and I assume
1000 is too long for you. I seem to encounter quite a few mail clients
-- PMMail, say -- that leave it entirely to the user's discretion.
Standard? Please.

5. Dr. Alexander "Trouble" Sarras:
maab>> Yes, it's very important not to challenge 
maab>> things on the net with a 17-year tradition 
maab>> behind them. That would be bad.
>> 
ATS>THAT's not the rason. But it is every _intelligent_ persons duty to
query
ATS>someones mental fitness who uses an pressure-air driven driller to
repair a
ATS>harddisk.
>
ATS>There are tools and there are fools.

I'm sorry, this is just supposed to be gibberish, right?

M. A. Baum