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

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Al" == Al Hudson <home [at] alexhudson.com> writes:

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 02:52:36PM +0100, Will Newton wrote:

    Al> I think, though, that word-wrapping is more a receiver than
    Al> sender problem - I'm using mutt, and I can't believe mutt
    Al> defaults to anything other than strictly conformant :) I'm
    Al> pretty sure Evolution does wrapping for you.

Well, mutt obviously does not do wrapping unless you ask to.  I don't
recall the details offhand, but I know that Mutt has several defaults
that are not conformant (most apply to non-ISO8859-1 locales, though).
Lines longer than 72 characters are not recommended, and ...

    >> Pine wraps when viewing but not when editing/replying/quoting.
    >> Please don't do it.

Hear, hear.

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

72 is recommended.  The paragraph below is over 500 characters without
a line break.  Double that (unusual but not improbable), and the
standard says that your mail is to be considered _binary_; a MIME type
of text/plain would be a _lie_.

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

Exactly.  You don't send it in "everybody's preferred format", you
send it in text/plain which can be read with more(1) if necessary.

More to the point, this is the computer age.  You're usg email, but
you don't seem to realize the implications.  A lot of mail is read by
programs, which are much easier to write if you don't have to deal
truly fucked-up syntaxes like HTML (by which I mean the stuff you see
in mail messages, not the RFC which is an application of ISO 8879 and
halfway parsable), RTF, and .doc.  Users should not have to think
about that; therefore it makes sense to use the LCD, which is
text/plain.  You don't have to use that exclusively; that's what
multipart/alternative is for.  Bandwidth is not a concern for email
(damn it, it is _not_: use IMAP if you can't afford broadband) and
hardly so for Usenet.

    >> GNOME really need to get their act together, they are light
    >> years behind KDE at the moment, who have a faster release cycle
    >> and more sensible packaging.

This is not surprising.  I wish GNOME could get their act together,
but I doubt they ever will.  Speaking from personal experience as a
catherd.

    Al> possibly. They're going to be at 1.4 very soon, but I'm kind
    Al> of sticking with it because KDE seems to get less and less
    Al> Free all the time. I don't really like the look of what the
    Al> Kompany is about, for example, but I s'pose it's personal
    Al> choice.

It's funny -- the most adamantly anti-Microsoft person I know is
rapidly becoming a KDE convert, because they give him the apps he
needs to get his paperwork done.  His real work, Linux distro
development, is done with a personal bag of tools, built by hand, of
course.  (Not from scratch, most are just custom builds with personal
preferences for standard configure options of GNU and BSD tools.)  But
for office environment, he's given up on GNOME and relies on KDE.

    Al> On a different tack - Mozilla 0.8.1 was downloaded and
    Al> installed today. Apart from the upgrade being a little ropey
    Al> (I've never had this problem with the previous versions!! It
    Al> didn't seem to like my old ~/.mozilla),

I've had that problem with every other upgrade of Mozilla, even across
Debian revs, let alone Mozilla milestone bumps.  But I suspect that's
Debian messing with the config options, not Mozilla itself.

    Al> machine, and faster than xforms (well, lyx), and Moz on the
    Al> whole feels faster than IE5 running on W2K Pro via vmware
    Al> (take from that what you will).

I started up IE the other day and was shocked at how sluggish it felt.

There's no question that free software is good software.  It's just
not usually good product yet.  And if GNU and GNOME don't get their
shit together, they'll be obsoleted by Kompanies and Projects that
make products out of the software.

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