Re: Format=Flowed
On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 09:08:13AM -0800, Gary Johnson wrote:
> On 2006-12-01, George wrote:
> > I've just noticed that messages generated by Mozilla, Apple Mail and
> > a few others that employ this format appear a bit odd when viewed in
> > mutt. Specifically, any spaces in the indent string are removed
> > from the display, so we see
> >
> > My question is whether this is a bug, a feature, or whether I should
> > go ahead and remove the format=flowed parameter from the
> > Content-Type header for all such emails, and call it a day.
>
> The structure of format=flowed messages is specified by RFC 3676.
For those not in the habit of reading RFCs, I'd recommend anyone reading
this message to at least have a quick read through of it. Using the RFC
utility from http://www.dewn.com/rfc/ makes it painless if you haven't
yet rolled your own approach.
> I didn't like it, so I wrote a patch to "fix" it:
>
>
> http://www.spocom.com/users/gjohnson/mutt/patch-1.5.5.1.gj.stuff_all_quoted.3
My guess is that the only reason I noticed was that I was in the process
of reviewing my procmail recipes in an attempt to mitigate the
increasingly creative ways people have of mucking about with email
messages. I wonder whether that desire to express a measure of
individuality isn't unlike the efforts of spammers to gain our
attention. That said, unappealing is probably the appropriate term, but
in the context of reading more than a few daily emails from friends and
family, it's significant as readability becomes paramount.
> It was written for mutt-1.5.5.1, but I have applied it successfully
> to mutt-1.5.12 as well. There is a brief description of the patch
> on this page:
>
> http://www.spocom.com/users/gjohnson/mutt/patches.html
For the moment, I have too many installations of mutt at 1.4.2 to
consider a patch for the moment, so I've opted for rewrites of the
Content-Type headers for my personal mail. I'll be sure to try it for
muttng, however.
My thanks to you and William for the replies. And for the patch, of
course.
--
George