[G4] Re: A Simple request

[Doug McNutt]

At 19:15 -0800 1/5/09, Eric Smith wrote:
>User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (Windows/20081209)
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

>Well, first of all, one of my pet peeves: messages with extremely
>long lines and no carriage returns. Having to continuously scroll
>left and right to read the message is really annoying.


The RFC for SMTP limits lines to 998 plus CR/LF characters.  RFC-2822 
and its cousins are silent on line length requirements but at one 
time use of such things as teletype machines established a practical 
limit of 80 characters.

Thunderbird is a modern mail reader that surely has provisions for 
word wrapping at the destination. It probably handles it for 
proportionally spaced fonts too.

Does anyone know what preference Eric should select to make it work?

Personally I like to reduce message width to something like a column 
in a newspaper. That long-ago course in speed reading of whole lines 
without allowing your eyes to move along a line fails for 
artificially shortened lines as they appear in a font size of MY 
choice. Fortunately Eudora has an option to unwrap that kind of text.

And format-flowed once worked but now we append  delsp=yes to it and 
URL's are once again messed up when line length is limited to 80 
characters.

What happens when you reduce the horizontal || size of this message 
in your mail reader so that the || is at the right side??

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