Line wrapping (was Draft SOP for requesting TCs/RCs)

[Kamil Paral]

> On Thu, 2012-03-15 at 12:28 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
> 
> > Hmm, yeah. It's kind of a mess in this area, each tool working
> > completely differently.
> 
> This is one of the major reasons hard line-wrapping is still usually
> recommended by experienced mail practitioners :)

Current situation is a mess and therefore we have to adhere to the lowest common denominator just to be able to communicate. That's awful.

The problem is that the situation doesn't improve, it's the same since stone age. It's because all the old-timers are fine with hard line-wrapping (I guess). Well I would rather force the tool authors to make the tools behave reasonable. Except that a lot of their developers are possibly old-timers. Hmm. But I suppose that could be solved in time. If you look at Gmail, it's an example how it can be done to "just work".

I played with Evolution a bit. It has a very nice feature of auto-wrapping your text when composing it. If that was available in Zimbra, I would enable it just for the sake of Adam to be able to read my mail :-) Unfortunately it's not. I tried manually wrap all my messages in the past and it's goddamn tiresome. Every time I need to add a sentence to the middle and re-wrap all of the remaining lines I swear like hell. That's not an option. Also replacing Zimbra is not really an option, for many reasons.

Adam complained that some messages display as a single line in Evolution. From my Evolution experiments it really seem not to allow to enable/disable line wrapping. But when I tried to create some plaintext draft without hard line-breaks, and then display it, it seemed to display it correctly (wrapping as needed). If it doesn't work for some emails, that seems like a bug to me, because Evolution can't possible expect all emails to be hard line-wrapped. It might be usual among OSS folks, but really among "general public". At least an option to enable/disable wrapping should be there (if it is not enabled by default).

This whole situation is unfortunate and I'm sorry if my long lines are causing problems for some specific clients, but I don't really see a better option here than push for some better standard. In this case, at least for better behaving clients, if not the whole line-reflow spec.

If you attach a bug report link against such a broken email client, I can promise to subscribe and support your case, it that helps at least a bit :-)