[geeks] mail formatting (was Re: HD/IDE question)

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 12:27:12AM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Fri, 29 Sep 2006 @ 09:54 -0500, Michael Parson said:
>
>> Long lines bother me simply because I find them hard to read, regardless
>> of the width of my display.  Mutt wraps them poorly, just cutting off
>> your long lines and putting a + at the beginning of the next line, not
>> even on word boundries.
>
> Actually, mutt is doing what it was told to do.

I wasn't blaming mutt =)

> The thing that is frustrating with people doing this and also using
> multimedia email is that there is no real standard for any of it.
>
> The normal way of doing this is to embed HTML and use that, but that's
> not a valid email standard and is actually horrible for the job.
>
> The problem is that in the 15 years we've been wanting to get past plain
> text, *NOBODY* has come up with a sane and well-designed standard for
> doing anything else.

What do you mean 'we'?  I've never wanted to get past plain-text.  But
I'm a Luddite, I suppose.

> Worse, what they have come up with is terrible, and in general people
> don't want to use or create email formats that still allow the text-only
> part of the message to be usable.
>
> I've even had idiots send me email where the text was in an image.

I get lots of spam like that =)

> Yeah, that did me a hell of a lot of good.
>
>> But I deal, I have nice vi macros, so I just hit 'e' and edit the file,
>> run the body of the message through par(1), use a few other macros to
>> clean up the quoting and wrapping of the quoted text, exit back out,
>> and read it cleanly.
>
> I've never found any that can be updated as fast as people find new ways
> to make simple things difficult.

My macros are more to deal with the long-line and poor quoting problem, 
someone sends me html only mail, my vi macros can't deal. 

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org