Warning: this message was generated by Apple Mail. I just can't stop my insatiable appetite for shiny things. :-( [1]
On 16 Oct 2012, at 03:46, Randall Gellens <randy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> At 9:12 AM -0400 9/5/12, Michael Richardson {quigon} wrote:
>
>> Maybe I'm also concerned because many in the former "elite" have moved to Apple Mail, and it seems that it is bug
>> compatible with Outlook in it's assumption that format=flowed is the default, an act which destroys email quoting, and therefore discussion.
>
> I just noticed this assertion, which is quite false. Format=flowed protects and preserved quoting. It's the only way to avoid ludicrous and impossible to read quoting (which happens after quoted passages get line-wrapped at odd points). Also, as far as I know, Exchange does not support format=flowed at all. My understanding is that it insists on HTML quoting, which is entirely different.
You're right that this is the virtue of F/F, but that's not what Michael said. Perhaps it was the context of the quoting, but the discussion refers to the fact that both LookOut and Apple Mail have (as you can see, by looking at this message) a nasty habit of *assuming* an F/F semantic by default. In other words, they generate hugely long long long long long long long long long lines that only another equally broken client can interpret correctly, but dynamically reflowing those lines, by applying consistent quoting indicators to the lines of such reflowed lines, and so forth. That, I believe, is a legitimate complaint, because it effectively creates an island between those who have support for Format/Flowed and those who do not. At least Apple has the decency to use quoted-printable encoding to protect the actual transmitted lines, but it means nothing if competent MIME readers reconstitute the corruption at the other end, by reassembling long lines, and then failing to reflow them. And it's worse yet if a news reader without MIME tries to quote the lines, complete with Q-P line terminators. Or if a reply comes from somebody whose editor wraps the lines, but using soft line breaks which are never generated externally, resulting in whole paragraphs being quoted using a single quoting indicator. And so on, and so on, and so on …
I filed bug 7989556 (Mail uses quoted-printable indiscriminately) with Apple on 16 May 2010. It was marked as duplicate of 7547565 on 25 May 2010. The system is closed; you can only see your own bug reports. I therefore have no idea what's going on with that. Meantime, I apologise for the inconvenience. No, really. :-(
Cheers,
Sabahattin
[1] This isn't strictly true. I'm blind, and Apple are the only guys who have stepped up to accessibility in anything approaching a serious manner, by including the screen reader in the OS and ensuring accessibility across their applications. For better or worse, they're the only choice for a smartphone, and the only choice for a Windows convert (notwithstanding textmode Linux, of course, which I still enjoy in VMs for braille support). I'm objective, so this could change, but on both Windows and Mac OS the only really accessible choices are the built-in MUAs (I used to use Pegasus Mail under Windows, when I had the screen reader support for it, although I now understand that Thunderbird has taken its place).