[META] email clients, YET AGAIN

From: Simon McClenahan (SMcClenahan@ATTBI.com)
Date: Thu Mar 14 2002 - 14:22:36 MST


I don't know if you did this deliberately or not, but your reply message
started with "begin", which is a known bug in Outlook Express which shows up
as having a phantom attachment and no message body. The only way to read the
message is to look at the source, the quickest way being control-F3.

If you did this deliberately, then I would like to bitch back at you, quit
your whining, get a 21st century MUA that can render in-process or with an
external plug-in or utility, HTML or MIME attachments with quoted-printable
text, etc.

If you did not do this deliberately, then to answer your question, most mail
readers (like Outlook Express) that send unformatted text are configured to
wrap lines when the message is sent. Some filtering may occur with the
mailing list software (majordomo?) but I doubt it. Detection is usually not
a general pattern-matching expression for a URI, but specifically email
addresses with an "@" or anything that starts with http:, mailto:, file:,
ftp:, or ends with known TLD's like .com . The pattern matching is of course
implemented differently in each MUA renderer. A smart one would be able to
join the split lines back up. You obviously don't have a smart enough MUA
(and neither do I, apparently) I get around wrapped "earls" with the classic
copy/paste/alt-tab/click/mouse-movement method (or learn your keyboard
shortcuts for mouseless navigation of applications and text editing).

Looking at the mail headers of Brian's message, there is no X-Mailer: header
which is a de facto standard for specifying the MUA used to compose the
message. Your message has no X-Header either. That tells me that either
Majordomo mangled it, or the message was composed on a Web interface that
does not fill in the X-Mailer: header, or that both you and Brian have lame
MUA's and should think about upgrading to something more modern.

HTH.:-P

cheers,
    Simon

----- Original Message -----
From: "Eugene Leitl" <Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 1:41 PM
Subject: Re: MEDIA: A Cyborg unplugged

begin Thu, 14 Mar 2002 the animated silicon love doll quotation:

> Because emails that are set to not wrap look really funny in most readers.

Any mailer which inserts a hard line break in the middle of a continuous
string is broken, regardless, whether this is an URI, or not. Most
applications today are URI-aware, recognizing and offering a choice of
action on a particularly formatted string. By inserting a line break you
make it impossible to decide whether the line below belongs to the URI, or
not. So, what do *you* do with a wrapped earl?

A double offense. And an indication that technology frequently does
advance -- in the retrograde direction.



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