[MlMt] Default format=flowed change in 5800?

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 3 May 2021, at 15:43, Pete Resnick wrote:

> Saw this in the release notes for Test Build 5800:
>
> - Changed: By default, MailMate no longer uses the format=flowed standard. For now, it can be enabled using MmFormatFlowedEnabled if needed/preferred.
>
> Why the change? There should be more format=flowed in the world, not less, IMO.

To be honest, I wanted to see if anyone cared/noticed. I'm only seeing less `format=flowed` in the world and it's not working well for some MailMate users. They may even be the majority, but they don't know why they are getting hard-wrapped replies when sending emails using MailMate which only require plain text (and therefore has no HTML part).

It's very likely I'll switch it back in some way, but I would like to find some kind of middleground solution which could work well for most users most of the time. For example, it would at least make sense to always use `format=flowed` for the plain text part when HTML is generated since that is unlikely to be a problem for most email clients (they either prefer HTML using an HTML editor or they have proper plain text support).

When sending plain text then it could perhaps depend on whatever MailMate knows about the correspondent, e.g., the email client used or the content-type headers seen in the past. It's tricky though since some email clients may not generate it while they are able to parse it. Note that Gmail (webmail) can do neither.

But note **I'm not trying to start a discussion on what is theoretically best here**. I'm only concerned about what works best in practice by default for all types of users. I'll make sure to provide an option to force the use of `format=flowed` on all outgoing emails for any users still believing the world will learn to embrace it. I'm not really there anymore :(

And yes, the quoted printable encoder in MailMate isn't as good as it could be (horrible wrapping choices).

-- 
Benny
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