At 11:42 AM +0100 10/19/12, Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:
Warning: this message was generated by Apple Mail.
But not using Format=Flowed.
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 e
This reflects a misunderstanding of
Format=Flowed. Properly generated F=F has lines
of no more than 78 characters. One of the
primary goals of F=F is good interoperability
between clients that support F=F and those that
support traditional pure plain text email. What
you're describing is a symptom of HTML quoting
(or a surprisingly poor F=F implementation):
When generating Format=Flowed text, lines SHOULD be 78 characters or
shorter, including any trailing white space and also including any
space added as part of stuffing (see Section 4.4). As suggested
values, any paragraph longer than 78 characters in total length could
be wrapped using lines of 72 or fewer characters. While the specific
line length used is a matter of aesthetics and preference, longer
lines are more likely to require rewrapping and to encounter
difficulties with older mailers. (It has been suggested that 66
character lines are the most readable.)
The restriction to 78 or fewer characters between CRLFs on the wire
is to conform to [MSG-FMT].
At least Apple has the decency to use
quoted-printable encoding to protect the actual
transmitted lines,
Again, this shows a fundamental misunderstanding
of F=F. Properly generated F=F does not use
quoted-printable unless otherwise needed:
[Quoted-Printable] encoding SHOULD NOT be used with Format=Flowed
unless absolutely necessary (for example, non-US-ASCII (8-bit)
characters over a strictly 7-bit transport such as unextended
[SMTP]). In particular, a message SHOULD NOT be encoded in Quoted-
Printable for the sole purpose of protecting the trailing space on
flowed lines unless the body part is cryptographically signed or
encrypted (see Section 4.6).
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 ?
All of these are part of the problem set that F=F
was created to fix. Proper F=F plays nice with
pure plain text.
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.
:-(
I haven't looked into Apple's mail's generation
of either F=F or plain text or HTML. If it
generates F=F with long lines and/or
indiscriminate q-p, then those would in my view
be bugs that should be fixed. But I don't know
if the symptoms described occur with Apple Mail's
F=F or some other format. To me, they sound like
lack of F=F.
--
Randall Gellens
Opinions are personal; facts are suspect; I speak for myself only
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