[X4U] APPLE's Mail Program

[Doug McNutt]

At 06:56 -0500 1/1/08, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
>This is an easy manual fix on your part. Simply put your url in angle 
>brackets, viz,
>  <http://www.offendingdomain.com/put/your/extra/long/annoying/line/breaking/uniform/resource/locator/in/angle/brackets/and/they/wont/get/line/munged.html
> >
>
>...and Apple Mail shouldn't break them.
>
>Lessee if this works.

Careful analysis - using Eudora 5.1 - of that by copy of the entire message, with blah-blah on so Eudora just displays what it got, and a subsequent paste into an MPW file.  This is what I see after replacing real spaces with (sp) and line ends with (rtn).

(sp)(sp)<http://www.offendingdomain.com/put/your/extra/long/annoying/line/breaking/uniform/resource/locator/in/angle/brackets/and/they/wont/get/line/munged.html(sp)(rtn)(sp)>(rtn)

The combination of two spaces separated by a return is typical of Apple Mail. "Old fashioned format-flowed capable clients remove the (rtn) and the space following it but they leave in the space before the (rtn) and, in this case, the trailing >.

Apple claims that including delsp=yes in this header absolves them of responsibility.

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes

I don't know why the first return was inserted so far into the line. In most cases I have seen a max line length of about 80 characters. It may be that the made-up url contains only [a-z/]. Most long URL's include a GET portion with [=;?] stuff where a break option might be programmed into Apple Mail.app.

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