On 23/01/2010, at 2:35 AM, Joe Hildebrand wrote: > We might need to enhance mailman to do the right thing. Example: > > http://lists.ranchero.com/pipermail/email-init-ranchero.com/2010-January/001342.html > > is unreadable on the web with the defaults.
Mailman *is* doing the /right/ thing, just what you /expect/.. That message wasn’t sent with “format=flowed”, if it were, the lines would break at roughly 70 to 80 characters. Apple Mail.app hasn’t supported “format=flowed” since Mac OS X 10.6.2, and I assume that is what Gruber sent his message with. Instead, it now uses “quoted-printable” encoding on all outgoing messages. AFAICT, it does this because various versions of Microsoft clients don’t support “format=flowed” and so “quoted-printable” is the only way to get them to rewrap text dynamically. As to which exact ones Microsoft clients do (are there any?) and don’t support “format=flowed”, I don’t know. Mailman sees a really long line of unbroken text and display it as such. This is the so-called “quoted-printable” means of sending long lines. “quoted-printable” encoding is used to send 8bit characters over a 7bit connection but also has the side effect of trimming long lines down to less than 76 characters for transport. From Wikipedia: ‘Lines of quoted-printable encoded data must not be longer than 76 characters. To satisfy this requirement without altering the encoded text, /soft line/ breaks may be added as desired. A soft line break consists of an “=” at the end of an encoded line, and does not cause a line break in the decoded text.’ [1] However, once the message is decoded, the individual lines can now be too long. Apparently, this is in violation of the RFCs. I propose that Letters should default to “format=flowed” but retain the option for using “quoted-printable” encoding instead when the minor side-effects of “format=flowed” [2] are not desired. For messages where “format=flowed” is appropriate and that contain non-7bit characters, the combination of the two is perfectly valid also. I’m sending this message with Apple Mail, so you can have a look at it in the archives to see what I mean. I've used fancy quotes in this email, so the ideal client would use "format=flowed" and "quoted-printable" when sending it. [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable> [2] <http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html> _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list List help: http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/email-init-ranchero.com
