Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 14:25:16 -0500 From: Andrew Hesford <ajh3@usrlib.org> To: Angshuman Dasgupta <angshumand@yahoo.com> Cc: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Sorry had to post this Message-ID: <20010619142516.A16045@core.usrlib.org> In-Reply-To: <20010619231822.C9168@yahoo.com>; from angshumand@yahoo.com on Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 11:18:22PM %2B0530 References: <006601c0f8c1$c17327e0$711663cf@icarz.com> <20010619204051.A5697@yahoo.com> <15151.34352.111629.822066@nomad.yogotech.com> <20010619231822.C9168@yahoo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 11:18:22PM +0530, Angshuman Dasgupta wrote: > The problem is not with my mailer but with the original poster's mailer. My mailer is mutt + vi which doesn't insert stupid newlines into a line to break it up. If your mailer doesn't break lines up, then you do have a problem. It is bad email form to keep messages as one big line. The problem is that recipients, with clients like mutt or pine, will insert a break at the character that touches the end of the line, rather than go about it intelligently. Then you might wind up with lines that look like such: My mailler is mutt + vi whic +h doesn't insert newlines i +nto a line to break it up. It is th sender who is responsible for breaking messages into an orderly block of text, not the recipient. And newlines used for this purpose aren't "stupid," they are necessary to preserve the sanity of email, and its readers' good moods. As you will see above, mutt also chokes on your unbroken line, because it puts a reply arrow at the beginning of the line only. If you have color enabled, you will see the first line of your reply text is green, but the second is not. Certainly it is easy to make out what is what, but this is not the case in long messages. It makes for rough reading. If you use vim with mutt, you can set the vim arguments to be + -c "set textwidth=72" -c "set wrap" and it will wrap characters with the generally accepted standard 72-column width. This will help maintain your good reputation on mailing lists like this. There are many (myself included) who simply ignore unwrapped messages, because reply text becomes a nightmare. Yours is the only exception I've made in a number of months. -- Andrew Hesford ajh3@usrlib.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20010619142516.A16045>