Which Email Client

[Mike Touloumtzis]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 01:43:48PM -0500, Louis LeBlanc wrote:
>
> IIRC, it's even in some nettiquette guide somewhere.

More than that, it's in standards track RFCs :-)

See, among others, http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt

The ordinary text/plain MIME type is explicitly for sender-formatted text.

Mail can get recipient-formatted text by using shorter lines and the
MIME type "text/plain; format=flowed".  The text is still supposed to be
wrapped to 79 columns or less, but the recipient is allowed to reflow it
for display purposes (such as when using a proportional-spaced font).
The RFC cited above even describes how to reflow such text when it's
quoted to arbitrary depths.

The message that started this thread instead used text/plain and really
long lines.  This is not standards compliant behavior, although an
incredible number of email clients perpetrate it.

miket