On Friday 18 January 2008 09:19, Pat Hayes wrote:
> At 7:27 AM -0800 1/18/08, Peter Yim wrote:
> >...
> >
> >It is recommended that you set your mail client to send & receive in
> >plain text only, and to wrap the text with line length of 65
> >characters.
>
> That is easier said than done. I am using Eudora, which is itself now
> somewhat ancient, but still belongs to a generation of email handlers
> which postdate Unix, and it uses flowed text conventions. It is
> impossible to wrap such text with a line length: the very concept of
> a line length does not apply, (01)
I used Eudora for many years, and I don't recall having a problem
getting it to wrap message body text. (02)
> ...
>
> All of us have a lot of email traffic to attend to, and to set one's
> general preferences to plaintext-only would be suicide in the current
> world of general email. (03)
I don't understand this. Just because someone sends you HTML messages
does not require you to reply in kind. (04)
> And fascinating as the Forum is, I'm not
> prepared to switch my Eudora preferences back and forth every time I
> send an email, sorry. (05)
I used to use Eudora and I don't recall having a problem getting output
wrapped. (06)
The only real shortcoming of the Eudora of yore (and was still true the
last time I check a year or so ago) is that it does not respect or
insert the proper In-Reply-To headers. To my mind, this is an egregious
failure to implement a standard and something it shares with that
abomination, Outlook (+Express). (07)
> I'd suggest that the trolls allow themselves to be dragged kicking
> and screaming into the late 20th century, and use html like everyone
> else. It looks a lot better, for one thing. (08)
I'm all in favor of using styled email text. Some italics, bold, a
modicum of color and some moderate size variations can be enormously
helpful in aiding readability of text (that's why those things were
invented in the first place). And I often make the same argument about
modern email. However, arbitrary HTML with enormous text or, simply,
excessive range of sizes (making it impossible for the recipient to
select a suitable baseline size) using very ill-chosen colors does
_not_ aid readability, it impairs it significantly. Sadly, such poor
use of these capabilities is what prevails. (09)
The real problem is that either the defaults in MUAs such as Eudora and
Outlook are extremely poorly chosen, or people deliberately configure
them to produce heinous messages. If most people had even a little
sense of what constitutes good typographic design, everything would be
fine, but well chosen sizes, layouts and colors are the exception, not
the rule. The messages on this list are not an exception, either. (010)
> Pat (011)
Randall Schulz (012)
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