On 15 Oct 2007 at 12:50:37 -0500, "Charlotte Webb" charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/14/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
Lately, a lot of people have been posting messages here that are malformatted, with long lines stretching out indefinitely. You can see this when you look at the web archive, where you sometimes have to scroll a mile to the right to see all of the message. This is contrary to the standards of RFC 2822, which recommend that there be a hard break after lines of no more than 79 characters.
This is probably something in their mail client that they have no idea how to control. I know I don't. Maybe you count letters and add linebreaks but I think most of us just type a bunch of run-on sentences which wrap themselves without any difficulty.
A part of my original message that you snipped was a link to a section of my site that gives information on how to configure various mail programs to follow the standards better.
http://mailformat.dan.info/config/
I also have a tool for checking the format of a message to see how well it follows the standards:
http://mailformat.dan.info/tools/check.html
On 10/15/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
A part of my original message that you snipped was a link to a section of my site that gives information on how to configure various mail programs to follow the standards better.
Rather than click there I will most assuredly take your word for it.
My point is that since everything on the mailing list goes through the lists.wikimedia.org server, before going to subscribers' inboxes or to the "/pipermail/" web archive directory, it would be much more efficient to convert it, 79-odd bytes at a time at that stage, to a RFC 2822-compliant feng shui (and no human would have to read the original non-line-broken versions), than to individually coax users and their mail clients into conformity.
—C.W.