On Fri, Jun 25, 1999 at 03:41:21PM -0500, Matthew N. Kleiman wrote:
>
> I've always believed that a well-behaved email client will wrap long
> lines before sending email, on the premise that some email programs
> don't have a word wrap feature. I simply assumed it was the _sender's_
> obligation to wrap long lines, not the recipient's.
>
> However, upon further research, the internet email protocals clearly
> permit line lengths up to 1000 characters (rfc 821). This perhaps
> suggests that it's the _recipient's_ job to wrap long lines, not the
> sender's.
I think it suggests that the authors of the SMTP standard didn't want
to constrain the format of message bodies any more than necessary.
RFC 822, which actually defines the structure of an Internet message,
places no restrictions on the lengths of lines in the message body.
> On the other hand, even if long lines are "legal," that doesn't
> necessarily make them "polite." The recipient may not have a word wrap
> function, or the recipient's program may break long lines at incorrect
> places, impairing legibility. I'm fairly confident that every modern
> email program has a word wrap function, so imposing this rule on list
> subscribers should not impose a great burden.
Most of them do, but they don't generally restrict the wordwrap to 80
columns. You can resize an editing window to 120 columns and it'll
happily wrap your lines to that length, without even warning you.
--
Regards,
Tim Pierce
RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative
system obfuscator and hack-of-all-trades
