[Ham-Mac] Correct Way to Post to Yahoo Groups Using Apple Mail

[T. Joseph Carter]

With the advent of GUIs for reading email, people began sending out 
paragraphs as a single line so that messages would display using the 
whole width of a person’s email window, regardless of what size it 
was.  This was not appreciated by those using plain text emails, and 
many poorly written mail servers would mangle the messages.  Some 
still do, more than a decade later.

So they came up with this MIME extension for us plain text email 
folks called format=flowed.  Messages are still broken up into lines 
for text clients and horrible mail servers that should’ve been taken 
out and shot years ago.  But the recipient mail client, if it knows 
how to handle the messages, will glue together any two lines if the 
first one ends in a space.

That is, 

"Hi "
"there, "
"how"
"are "
"you?"

gets reassembled into two lines:

"Hi there, how"
"are you?"

Basically, a new lines are used only to break paragraphs, and spaces 
before a newline are going to result in the newline being "soft" (and 
essentially erased) on the receiving end (unless the sender is smart 
enough to strip them out—don’t bet on that though!)

Rich text emails are sent out of Apple Mail with two copies of the 
message.  One is plain text and follows the above rules.  The other 
is HTML and is probably formatted in some way to not use too long of 
a line, but the end result is the same: <CR> is generally used to 
break paragraphs, not lines.  Just beware of stray spaces before the 
newline.  HTML will cope, but format=flowed plain text won’t.

My own emails are sent using format=flowed text, even though I am one 
of those text-based email reading dinosaurs.  ;)

Joseph - kf7qzc


On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 02:33:22PM -0500, Dick Kriss wrote:
>Ron,
>
>Thanks! You confirmed what I was thinking was correct. The Apple Mail <CR> is not understood by Yahoo.
>
>Dick
>
>On Aug 1, 2011, at 11:52 AM, Ron Rosson wrote:
>
>> I have found if you type your message and let the application do the word wrapping itself the messages come out formatted properly. The only time you would hit the carriage return is if you wanted to start a new paragraph..
>>
>> Hope this helps (this message was typed using Mail under Lion)
>>
>> 73's
>>
>> --
>> Ron Rosson (KF5JRA)
>> kf5jra at oneinsane.org
>>
>>
>> On Aug 1, 2011, at 11:48 AM, Dick Kriss wrote:
>>
>>> Can someone tell me how to get Apple's Mail to issue a return <CR> that will be interpreted correct by the Yahoo Groups?
>>>
>>> Dick
>>>
>>>
>>>> Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2011 09:16:53 -0500
>>>> From: Dick Kriss <aa5vu at att.net>
>>>> Subject: [Ham-Mac] Correct Way to Post to Yahoo Groups Using Apple
>>>> 	Mail
>>>> To: ham-mac <ham-mac at mailman.qth.net>
>>>> Message-ID: <AD4F319C-56D4-45AC-8359-DE83981A612F at att.net>
>>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>>>>
>>>> I am trying to find the correct way to post to a Yahoo Group using Apple's Mail such that the word wrap comes out semi-normal. I am using Apple's Mail v5.0 under 0S X 10.7 using the default Rich text message format.
>>>>
>>>> The problem has been when I used the return key to set the wrap. Yahoo ignored the return and inserted an automatic CR's after x-number of characters. This produced some really screwed up looking messages on the Yahoo web pages and digests formats.
>>>>
>>>> I have changed the way I format the text and avoid using a single return and let Yahoo set the wrap.  Yahoo seems to understand a double return for a new paragraph. I think it worked on this posting
>>>>
>>>> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KenwoodTS-590/message/6774
>>>>
>>>> If someone has a better suggestion, please speak up.
>>>>
>>>> Dick AA5VU
>>>
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