Re: [Nmh-workers] Features for 1.6

[David Levine]

Norm wrote:

> Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:
> >Hope it didn't come across like I was picking on you ... you
> >had explained (from what I remember) that a correspondent of
> >yours complained that your emails looked "funny", so you
> >eventually settled on just making your paragraphs one long
> >line.

Note that lines longer than 998 characters are not allowed.

> >(It does occur to me, however, that if you set automimeproc
> >to 1 in your mh_profile then all of your emails would be
> >encoded as q-p and they should show up properly for
> >everyone).
> 
> Rather than risk irreversible injury to my 81 year old brain,
> trying to understand what q-p means and what buildmimeproc
> does, I will revert.

q-p is "quoted-printable", an encoding scheme for text.  Encoded
q-p text is more or less readable, but it can interfere with
quick grepping of messages because it works by introducing
additional characters.  For that reason, I don't use automimeproc.
(And printable ASCII characters don't need to be encoded.)

> But there is a small problem. My standard editor width is not 78
> columns, but 80 columns. So I will have to introduce an option into
> my editor to make the window width 78 columns (actually, I'll make
> it 77 columns to have a bit of slop). I wonder what I should name
> that option. Said differently where and how did you get that
> number,78 columns? I suppose it's some kind of standard?

Well, the 78 character limit is a "SHOULD" rather than a "MUST".
It's in sec. 2.1.1 of RFC 5322 (and 2822), which begins:

   There are two limits that this standard places on the number
   of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no
   more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78
   characters, excluding the CRLF.

David