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> It gets lost easily; How, unless the MUA is modifying quoted text beyond prefixing each line with >. > intermixing mail clients that handle it with those t
by u801e 7y ago
> It gets lost easily;
How, unless the MUA is modifying quoted text beyond prefixing each line with >.
> intermixing mail clients that handle it with those that don't (or have been intentionally configured to ignore it because it mangles mails) produces poor results
I participated in many lengthy discussions in deeply nested threads on usenet with an email client (Thunderbird) that had format=flowed enabled for the text/plain posts that I was sending. I never noticed any issues when viewing posts I made or other posts that were descendants of my posts. That is, no problems with line wrap or other rendering issues (either when looking at it in Thunderbird's view pane or looking at the raw message text).
> it often breaks signatures;
It shouldn't break them if the client applies the signature itself.
> it makes it harder to quote and reply to emails
I don't see how this would be the case. When you reply to an email, the MUA should prefix each line in the body of the original message with a > character. Whether those lines have a single trailing whitespace character or not shouldn't make a difference in terms of quoting the original text.
> it means the person on the other end will not see exactly what you sent.
Unless you have text that requires wrapping at specific line lengths, they will see what you sent. If their client supports the flowed format, the lines will be rewrapped to your screen width. If their client does not, then they see the original raw text with trailing whitespace at the end of each line (other than the last line of each paragraph) which essentially is not visible to the reader unless they've configured their client to display a marker for trailing whitespace.
- JoshTriplett 7y agoTrailing whitespace gets lost easily in editors. Mail clients not designed around HTML mail often track lines rather than paragraphs, and don't distinguish "hard wraps" and "soft wraps". The concept of "format=flowed" itself can get mangled if someone with a mail client that doesn't support it replies. And yes, people do send things like ASCII art or underlined text or code or other things where whitespace and wrapping matters.
- u801e 7y ago> Trailing whitespace gets lost easily in editors. As far as I'm aware, mail clients typically don't modify quoted text beyond prepending each line with a > character. Even if the trailing whitespace is lost, then you'll just have a conventional hard wrapped message (which is no different than just using a mail client that doesn't support format=flowed). > The concept of "format=flowed" itself can get mangled if someone with a mail client that doesn't support it replies. Not in my experience. If they remove the trailing whitespace, then it's essentially hard-wrapped again. If they don't, then it's still flowed. > And yes, people do send things like ASCII art or underlined text or code or other things where whitespace and wrapping matters. In that case, the flowed option isn't suitable. The RFC I referenced does support a fixed option for the format parameter which would address that issue. Also, Thunderbird did not attempt to append whitespace to previously quoted material if it didn't have it already. In any case, the flowed format would work perfectly for this particular thread since no one is hard wrapping anything.