It is true, to quote RFC 2282: "Each line of characters must be no more than 998 characters, and should be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF." On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 7:11 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Unfortunately, I think that this is part of the traditional internet email standard.
Apparently, these standards had to cope with Unix/C people who couldn't count past 255, so line lengths are _required_ to be broken up in (apparently) as odd a place as possible.
You will also see from time to time a ">" character inserted before the word "from" if it occurs as the first character of a line. This is because "<cr>From" is the _delimiter_ for email!
But I'd still rather use ascii character based email; "html"/"rich text" email can hide all kinds of non-sense that you don't want to allow.
Then there is always the O(n^2) growth in delimiters from quoting quotes which also quote quotes. You can see this O(n^2) growth in operation at the end of math-fun emails which have a 4-line terminator at every level of quoting!
[O(n^2) because people tend to quote the _entire_ email each time they reply.]
At 06:00 PM 4/25/2011, Mike Stay wrote:
On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:28 PM, Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> wrote:
How do I stop idiot GMail from linebreaking? IBM punch cards were 80 column.
http://groups.google.com/group/google-mail-problem-solving-uk/browse_thread/...
This suggests you can't without sending HTML email, which isn't allowed on this list. I have a greasemonkey script that makes the message composition area be a monospace font even in plain text mode; it shouldn't be hard to change it to set the width to 78 characters so you can see where your message will wrap. -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com
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