On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 07:03:00AM +0100, A.J. Bonnema wrote:
Just use wrapping in you MUA. Hard returns should *never* be necessary. If your email client doesn't support it, switch to one that does. Mozilla does, I think Evolution does.
Netiquette asks for wrapping at about 72 characters on the *sender*
side.
Well, almost. RFC1855 states:
"
Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line with a carriage return
"
As far as I could find on www.ietf.org/rfc.html this is the netiquette: so you are right and I stand corrected. Still, read on...
Seeing that you cannot rely on the MUA the recipient is using, this still is a good idea, IMO. Many MUAs can indeed do this automatically (I for example use vim as my editor in mutt, which also wraps automatically before sending).
> > Cheerio, > > Thomas
Actually, I disagree. Evolution should have its effects on these guidelines. It might have been good form to limit your message to two lines as mesasges became too heavy to lift if a message contained more lines ...... in the stone age ;-).
However, times change. Guidelines should change too. Maybe it is still a good idea to end lines at 65 characters. When most if not all but the most outdated MUA's are able to use wrapping, the guideline seems useless and could be changed.
I'll go with the guideline though and change my editor to break lines into about 70 characters. [checking preferences....found it...] Apparantly, Mozilla is already configured to do just that. So, unknowingly I already complied.
mmmm, so actually Mozilla is smart enough to comply with netiquette automagically, where possible.... nice.
Anyway, thanks for the pointer.
Guus. -- A.J. Bonnema, Leiden The Netherlands, user #328198 (Linux Counter http://counter.li.org)
