On Apr 11, 2011 at 10:44 PM +0200, Richard wrote:
yes, I am also modifying editor per recipient. At least I did it for
this and some other experiments. Often I call the editor through some
content/formatting wrapper.
Ahh ok.
Other than that I have little understanding what and how text_flowed really
does, used to do, is supposed to do and what other mailers are doing - other
than getting complaints from people whose client can not handle the one or the
other setting.
The way it's supposed to work is to hard wrap your text at 80 characters (or
78 or 79, but this is a detail - it should probably be a character or two less
then 80). That way normal clients see a nice block of of email that has
already had line breaks inserted into it, instead one gigantic line.
The magic sauce though is that there is a space at the end of each line that
is part of the same paragraph. This, in conjunction with the format=flowed
header, let's mail clients reconstruct paragraphs into unwrapped single lines.
Which they can then softwrap for display.
Supposed I like my emails wrapped at 90 characters for display and your prefer
110 or to the edge of the window. With regular hard wrapped text we can't
change that. But with format=flowed text, we can.
The beauty of it is that it's encoded in normally wrapped text, so the default
fallback is a block of text wrapped at 80 characters, which shouldn't cause
problems for anyone. It also facilitates doing some smarter things with
quoted text - your email program can take quote >'s into account when it wraps
the text. It pulls them out, wraps the text, and sticks them back in, so you
don't end up with a mess of odd quoting characters in the body of a quote.
Of course, that preference in mutt only sets the header. It's up to you to
use an editor that actually does the right thing. If you use vim, you can do:
set fo+=w
for the right behavior.
I'm sure mail clients on the receiving end can screw this up, but I'm guessing
we'd need more details.
Here's a FAQ on it that someone wrote:
<http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html>
