[MlMt] Default format=flowed change in 5800?

[Pete Resnick]

It used to be the case that some clients did the right thing with 
format=flowed, but if you used quoted-printable "wrapping" to make 
really long lines for paragraphs, they would display them using a 
horizontal scroll bar. I don't know what the current state of affairs 
is. At least with format=flowed, you get a 72-column wrap in clients 
which don't support it, which is not so bad in most clients. And in 
clients that do support it, it looks good, even on really tiny phone 
screens.

It makes me crazy that clients don't support it; it's the simpleist 
thing in the world to implement for both sending and receiving, and it 
makes editing messages with quotes so much easier.

(BTW: I'd love MM to have the option to send "text/plain; 
markup=markdown; format=flowed" and no HTML to certain folks.)

pr

On 14 May 2021, at 14:21, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> 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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-- 
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best
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