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

[David Woolley]

Brian Mury wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-12-25 at 11:45 -0800, Ron D'Eau Claire wrote:
> 
>> I use MS Outlook, and don't get over-length lines requiring scrolling from

Outlook doesn't, as far as I know, have options to display plain text
email according to standards, so you will probably never see the problem 
if you only use that client.  For thunderbird, setting the advanced 
option "mail.wrap_long_lines" to false ought to reveal problem articles.

> 
> Email clients will usually wrap text on outgoing messages to a certain
> line length (normally less than 80 characters), but some clients do not.

It's part of the basic netiquette guidelines.

> The standard is for text to be wrapped. Unwrapped text has traditionally
> been considered poor practice and made emails difficult or impossible to

Unwrapped text should be displayed as close as possible to unwrapped. 
On a GUI client that should mean as a single line with a scroll bar.  On 
a fixed width display, that is with breaks between characters at the 
screen width.

Unfortunately early GUI email clients treated text like notepad in wrap 
mode, and thus broke the email standards.  Unfortunately, people using 
such broken clients don't see the problem, so it is an unrealistic 
expectation that people, brought up exclusively on GUI clients, should 
generate correct email in this respect.

In case anyone is going to throw in the progress argument, really up to 
date email clients use some conventions that allow compatible email 
clients to re-wrap text, without sending a whole paragraph on one line.

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

The guideline is somewhat less than this, to allow for a few levels of 
quoting.


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

See my signature, for the netiquette RFC that covers this sort of thing, 
but, as noted above, in reality all you can do is use the problem as a 
newbie detector, as complaining here is unlikely to change many people's 
  ways.

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.