Re: [Sheflug] B0rked email clients (was: Login Screen just to please A.B. :)

["Chris J/#6" <nospam [at] nccnet.co.uk>]

>
> So what I am supposed to do ? Wrap at 74? 76? Maybe 70? If quotes go to two deep, that means you can have '> > ' which breaks lines at 76.. and of course, it assumes we're all using 80-column terminals to read our mail (hint: I'm not).
>

A good guide, though it's written with Usenet mostly in mind it's still 
followed pretty relevant for mail (especially lists), is the de-facto 
standard "son-of-RFC1036", a copy of which can be found at [long line]:

http://www.landfield.com/software/ftp.landfield.com/news/son-of-rfc1036/ne
ws.txt.Z

It suggests:

   4.3.2. Body Conventions

          Although body lines can in principle be very long (see  sec-
          tion  4.6  for  some  discussion  of length limits), posters
          SHOULD restrict body line lengths to circa 70-75 characters.
          On  systems  where  text  is conventionally stored with EOLs
          only at paragraph breaks and  other  "hard  return"  points,
          with  software  breaking lines as appropriate for display or
          manipulation, posting agents SHOULD insert EOLs as necessary
          so that posted articles comply with this restriction.

> I probably will turn wrapping on my mail clients, just to shut the whiners up :) But note, I never complain about what gets sent to me, I accept word-wrapped, non-word-wrapped, rtf, MIME encoded, HTML, etc. It really doesn't matter, because my client handles them all perfectly well. I don't mind attachments, I just don't care. Other people might do well to be less anal (miaow :) and follow the maxim 'be liberal in what you accept, and strict in what you send'... if I was to configure my client to send 'email' in everybody's preferred format, I basically wouldn't be able to send anyone anything....

I dislike HTML mail as I've never seen it used sensibly, and some online 
shops have a habit of sending them then linking back to theirs for all 
the images (IMG SRC=http://whatever/) which means you can't read offline 
/or/ they take f**king ages to display as you wait for the sods to 
download. That plus I use a text-only mail reader (exmh - Tcl/TK 
front-end for Mail Handler).

Attachments can be a bugger if you aren't expecting them - not everyone 
has access to a nice big pipe; most of us probably still have 56k modems 
(or slower), so a "quick login to check email" turns into 30 mins - I 
will accept them, but I like to have some notification first. If 
anything, if its large, better for it to be plonked in a private area on 
a server (web, ftp, or whatever) so I can pick it up when I have the 
bandwidth or time to spare.

I'm not a case of fussiness about what comes in - it's a case of whether 
you want email to be read or not...send it in HTML only if you want - 
I'll just /dev/null it :)

Chris...



-- 
Chris Johnson            \  "If not for me then, do it for yourself. If not
sixie@nccnet.co.uk        \  for then do it for the world." -- Stevie Nicks
www.nccnet.co.uk/~sixie/   ~---------------------------------------+
Redclaw chat - http://redclaw.org.uk - telnet redclaw.org.uk 2000   \______


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