On Mon, 2020-08-10 at 00:14 +0000, Falsifian via agora-discussion wrote: > Wait, I didn't look very closely at the archive link I posted. It > looks like it has the inverse problem. > > My email client: the names line up. > > Gaelan's: zombie names are further to the right. > > archive page: non-zombie names are further to the right. > > I wonder what's going on.
An excerpt from the headers of the original email: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed "format=flowed" means that the sender has requested the recipient to change whitespace within quotes, in an attempt to prevent awkward wrapping caused as a consequence of having several levels of nested quotes. So people's email clients are busy messing with the whitespace in order to try to make the result look good, from their point of view. Anyway, the main important issue that's going on here is that in addition to reflowing quotes, format=flowed text also allows for a convention to mark text that shouldn't be reflowed: you add an additional space at the start of the line. It seems that some of our email clients are interpreting the leading spaces as conventional to trigger the format=flowed requirements (thus deleting them), and some of our email clients are interpreting the spaces as actual spaces and showing them. This means that depending on the chain of email clients the messages have gone through, the amount of leading space on the messages varies (and this affects the "z" lines, because after some transformations they have no room to move further to the left). See <https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt> for more information. -- ais523
