[X4U] Mail line endings

[Doug McNutt]

At 14:23 -0500 2/4/07, Peter Saint James wrote:
>
>	I've been having a problem in Mail with spacing and line endings.  
>I've got to get it solved because I have to send out some e-mails  that must look right.
>
>
>	If I try to paste anything into a message, it looks right before  sent, but when I see the message after sent (like on a mailing list  or in a reply), many line endings are wrong:  lots of short lines,  sometimes only one word.  Also words will run together, usually about  once per line.  The problem is the Mail does not convert line endings  to spaces.  Or it converts some and misses some.
>
>	I had assumed at first that the problem came because I was pasting  from Word.  I have noticed, however, it happens even when I paste  from another mail message or move a paragraph in the same message.
>
>	I tried various tasks under Services that looked promising.  I tried  "remove line ending."  Didn't work.  I tried "convert to Mac line  endings."  Didn't help.  I tried "reformat."  That helped a little.  
>The problem is less pronounced, but still there.

Readable mail - and that means email, not just Apple's mail.app - is a PITA for everyone. I have opinions but not much that you would call help. I saw your post on X-SW and refrained because I'm likely to get flamed for this one.

ASCII TEXT is the best kind of mail. Let the READER choose the window width, line length as displayed, and font. Use two line ends between paragraphs, keep paragraphs shorter than 998 characters which is the maximum allowed by SMTP delivery agents. Turn off all formatted mail options. Tell your mail client NOT to wrap lines. Don't send via someone else that will mess it all up. AOL comes to mind but mailing list digests are also terrible. Mail clients can and will "helpfully" change what you sent during a copy associated with a reply.

If you must send formatted mail create an Adobe PDF document and enclose it as an attachment. Don't even think about attaching a WORD *.doc document.

Pasting from M$WORD into mail.app probably subverts all of the above. It's likely that you have created HTML mail which is a sort of web page included in a message that expects the reader to interpret it with browser-like software. Further it's likely that the paste operation employed RTF formatted "rich" text that is never exactly the same between Microsoft apps and Apple apps. Mail.app might well be faced with a conversion operation that is guessing about things as they go by.

Save the WORD document as text only and try opening that file in mail.app - well, Eudora or a real text editor - copy from there into mail.app.  Or do what I do. Run Eudora on an 8500 with OS 9 that doesn't "help" by defaulting to unicode, HTML, or RTF.

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