[MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers

[Bill Cole]

On 2026-02-26 at 21:20:13 UTC-0500 (Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:20:13 -0800)
Randall Gellens <mailmate at lists.freron.com>
is rumored to have said:

> (There was a time when sending anything that used characters not 
> present in U.S. ASCII did require a form of encoding, but these days 
> support for Unicode is pretty robust.)

I wish that were sufficiently true but as of last Spring, it was still 
somewhat common for mail exchangers to not announce support for the 
SMTPUTF8 extension which is required to avoid Base64, Quoted-Printable, 
or (very rarely today) UUCode encoding.

Beyond that there is ALSO an issue of how to structure the text of a 
plain text message so that it is displayed reasonably on screens of all 
widths, in whatever  font the recipient prefers. The ideal choice would 
be for all MUAs to support the "format=flowed" attribute (RFC3676) and 
offer users coherent formatting choices. MailMate does so but many MUAs 
do bad things with format=flowed messages, as a consequence of Microsoft 
sabotage and to some degree a failure of web archivers of public mailing 
lists.


-- 
  Bill Cole
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