>> Others have answered your question, but I have to ask ... what, exactly, >> is the problem? nmh is working exactly as designed here. > >I guess the problem is that it looks ugly, and I want to make sure that >things work correctly when the email is sent to the destination.
Fair enough! As far as I know, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE, the nmh behavior should work for all MUAs, since it's not mangling the headers at all and preserves the original encoding. Nobody else thinks it looks ugly because they never see the raw encoding. I think anything you would do to make it look "less ugly" for you will end up making it worse for the rest of the world. >In my experience and understanding, NMH makes a lot of assumptions about >RFC compliance that I don't trust your average gmail user to honor. >I've already (as far as i know) lost the ability (or the know-how) to >send mono-space text to people via email. People notice that my >emails are chopped into 72-character lines rather than what-they-think- >is-standard one line per paragraph. I just want to make sure that >some NMH-ism isn't going to affect them when they read emails I send them. Ah, THAT is rather frustrating, yes! I have been idly thinking about that; part of the issue there is I suspect most people are sending HTML email which explicitly marks paragraphs. So, solutions for that. Two thoughts come to mind: - You could use text/enriched, which defines a single CRLF as a space and a sequence of N CRLFs as N-1 actual CRLFs. This is kind of what you want. You could avoid all of the other enriched text stuff by changing every '<' into a '<<'. That is defined in RFC 1896. - You could use format=flowed email; paragraph lines that you want to autoflow properly have to end in a SP CRLF sequence. That is defined in RFC 2646. A very very brief test shows me that the webmail app for pobox.com doesn't really handle text/enriched, but does reflow longer paragraphs properly with format=flowed, and that still looks "normal" for us fossils. If you want to experiment with that, you can put as the first line of your message body #<text/enriched or #<text/plain; format=flowed And process the message using the "mime" command. I've thought about what it would take to auto-generate format=flowed text; it's easy for paragraphs but there are always corner cases. Like if you intersperse paragraphs with code snippets, could you put a marker in the text that says, "Don't make this part autoflow"? Or maybe we should give up and simply just convert plain text to text/html. Sigh. I wonder what other MUAs like mutt or pine do. --Ken
