[Elecraft] Avoiding those long lines of text we struggle to read!

[Brian Mury]

On Tue, 2007-12-25 at 11:45 -0800, Ron D'Eau Claire wrote:
> Interesting Dave. Are my lines over-length? 

No, yours are wrapped.

> I use MS Outlook, and don't get over-length lines requiring scrolling from
> anyone, either in ASCII as we see here on the reflector or in HTML in direct
> messages. Outlook automatically wraps text at the edge of the window as
> needed for proper display.  

Email clients will usually wrap text on outgoing messages to a certain
line length (normally less than 80 characters), but some clients do not.
The standard is for text to be wrapped. Unwrapped text has traditionally
been considered poor practice and made emails difficult or impossible to
read, depending on the email client used by the recipient. Unwrapped
email displayed as-is on a text-only console (no scroll bars!) is
impossible to read. In days past, this would often get the sender a
nasty email in response!

These days most email programs will wrap text on received messages if
they have not been wrapped by the sender, but again some clients will
not, and will display entire paragraphs as single lines if the sender
did not wrap them.

It is still considered good practice for email clients to wrap text in
outgoing email to less than 80 characters.

If you want to read the email format standards, you can find them here:
http://www.lemis.com/email/email-rfc.html

RFC 2822 is the original standard for plain ASCII (non-MIME email).
RFC 2646 covers the text/plain MIME type.


> What is your e-mail program? 

>From his email headers: Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (Windows/20071031)