[MlMt] Line breaks - where they shouldn't be

[Bill Cole]

On 31 Jan 2020, at 8:10, Thorsten Heitzmann wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am having a problem with line breaks appearing in my stuff when 
> mailed to other people. But it’s not as simple as it seemed 
> initially:
>
>
> - When YahooGroups recently closed, a group where I am a member moved 
> to groups.io. Soon, others began to complain that my email s looked as 
> if written by an idiot, full of line breaks.
> I then changed from „Markdown“ mode to „Plain text“ and 
> everything was ok on groups.io
>
> - However, now I get complaints about my normal mails having line 
> breaks. When I write them, they’re ok. When I look at them in the 
> „Sent“ folder, they’re ok. Yet the friend receiving them says 
> that there are horrible line breaks.
> So I told her that the problem must be on her side, to prove this I 
> opened Apple’s Mail.app, took that sent mail and re-sent it from 
> within Mail.app.
> Surprise: No line breaks.
> So the problem must be with MailMate, I think.
> I even went back to „Markdown“, btu that didn’t help.
>
>
> Any ideas? Hopefully it’s just a simple user problem ;-)

No one can agree on what "good" and "bad" line breaking is, despite the 
existence of a robust and functional standard, because for most of the 
past 20 years Apple & Microsoft have tried to accommodate their own 
legacy formatting hacks and each others' idiosyncrasies, resulting in a 
massive mess.

MailMate "plain text" follows the standard: "Format=flowed" as defined 
in RFC3676 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676) and in its predecessor 
RFC2646, which allows a *smart* mail client to reflow paragraphs to 
whatever line length it prefers while maintaining backward-compatibility 
with traditional mail clients that expect lines to be 80 characters or 
less. The one thing that the creators of that standard (the key one 
being a subscriber to this list, as recently as last Spring) did not 
anticipate was that Microsoft would completely ignore the standard  and 
handle format=flowed mail badly for years, as if they wanted their users 
to see every other mail client as bad at making email, while Apple would 
eventually abandon the standard in order to construct mail that looks 
better to Outlook users.

In short: to understand what's going on in your case, we'd need to see 
concrete examples and know what client is being used by the people who 
see your messages as problematic.




-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not For Hire (currently)