From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Thu Sep 30 1999 - 12:47:29 MDT
> Once again, I use no formatting. No fancy type.
> No carriage returns. Nothing. Nada....
Yes, that's exactly what we're saying, and that's the problem.
Some email progams (especially Mac-based ones) do not put explicit
carriage returns inside paragraphs, which is good for general
word-processing applications and some other mail readers, but not
for some old-school mail readers that expect those carriage
returns at fewer-than-80-character intervals. The fault is not
yours, but belongs to (A) the programmers of your email client and
that of the recipient; yours was more concerned with the esthetics
of the email than with the portability of its content, and eirs
was just too lazy to put in the code to handle longer lines than
expected; and (B) the creators of the protocol, who in their lack
of foresight did not adequately specify the standard.
It's not a big problem, just a minor nuisance. People have been
complaining about it for years in every list and every newsgroup,
but email software progresses a lot faster than standards, so it
will continue. I suggest that complaints be directed to the
right place: namely, the makers of the software that exacerbates
this problem. You should complain to your vendor that the
default settings of your program create mail that is difficult
for some recipients to read, and ey should complain that eir
software makes it difficult to read some mail sent by some common
software. It is probably more likely to be fixed on the receiving
end than on the sending end.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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