On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Alexander Staubo wrote:
Care to post these numbers *without* word wrapping?
Brian's message was sent with format=flowed and therefore it's easy to re-assemble into original form if your software understands that. I just checked with two e-mail clients (Thunderbird and Pine) and all his bonnie++ results were perfectly readable on both as soon as I made the display wide enough. If you had trouble reading it, you might consider upgrading your mail client to one that understands that standard. Statistically, though, if you have this problem you're probably using Outlook and there may not be a useful upgrade path for you. I know it's been added to the latest Express version (which even defaults to sending messages flowed, driving many people crazy), but am not sure if any of the Office Outlooks know what to do with flowed messages yet.
And those of you pointing people at the RFC's, that's a bit hardcore--the RFC documents themselves could sure use some better formatting. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=134270&action=view has a readable introduction to the encoding of flowed messages, http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html gives some history to how we all got into this mess in the first place, and http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html also has some helpful (albeit out of date in spots) comments on this subject.
Even if it is correct netiquette to disable word-wrapping for long lines like bonnie output (there are certainly two sides with valid points in that debate), to make them more compatible with flow-impaired clients, you can't expect that mail composition software is sophisticated enough to allow doing that for one section while still wrapping the rest of the text correctly.
-- * Greg Smith gsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
