On 22 Dec 2008, at 18:23, Steven Susbauer wrote:
Stroller wrote:
... Mailers should default to plain text
unless the user explicitly chooses otherwise.
...
Mailers should also default to useful column sizes, which seem to have
failed in the case of your last message.
Keith Moore's [1] "Recipient-Friendly MIME generation" seems to
suggest otherwise [2]:
Use the format=flowed option for typed-in text.
The format=flowed option (RFC 2646) is an extension to text/plain
that allows the sending mail user agent to represent unbroken,
wrappable text differently from text which is intended to be
represented as-is (without wrapping). It is also designed to be
readable on legacy mail readers that don't support format=flowed.
One advantage of format=flowed is that "wrappable" text can be
wrapped to suit the width of the recipient's display or output
medium - whether it's a big screen or a little PDA. Another
advantage
of format=flowed is that it works better with quotations, especially
when those quotations must be wrapped.
I hesitated before posting this, fearing that I would get slapped for
promoting the use of MIME on mailing lists. However when I check it
appears that "virtually all human-written Internet e-mail and a fairly
large proportion of automated e-mail is transmitted via SMTP in MIME
format. Internet e-mail is so closely associated with the SMTP and
MIME standards that it is sometimes called SMTP/MIME e-mail." [3]
Sections 4.1 & 4.2 of RFC 3676 [4], superseding RFC 2646 deal with the
MIME "Format" parameter and its value "flowed". I assume the IETF to
be authoritative on this, but please feel free to educate me.
Stroller.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Moore
[2] http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/opinions/mime-style.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME
[4] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt
