Re: CTRL-M everywhere
On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 09:32:09PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> George wrote:
> > Bob Proulx wrote:
> > > I have a family member who sends mail from a broken mailer. I
> > > can't change them so instead I filter and fix the messages. I
> > > have examples of how to do this in procmail that I would post if
> > > there were interest.
> >
> > I trust it's not too off-topic. Please do!
>
> The problem I was having that I wanted to solve was that MS-Outlook
> sends messages with every paragraph all on one line. The lines can go
> out to hundreds of columns. It is as if they expected to set
> format=flowed but forgot. There are several[1] good references to
> this subject.
>
> It just frustrated me every time I got an email this way. I could not
> get them to configure the mailer correctly to avoid this. I decided I
> would preprocess the messages in just this one particular case to ease
> my annoyance. So I am filtering this one person's messages through
> procmail upon receipt and fixing their MS-Outlook problem. But
> normally I would not want to modify messages like this. (I have
> changed the names in this example.)
>
> [...]
>
> Hope this was interesting...
It seems I neglected to send off a Thank You for your reply. Yes, it
was interesting. And useful.
As for feeling bad about having to edit your friend's messages, maybe it
will help to let you know I filter everybody's messages, including my
own. I (not unlike most people, I'm sure), have a laundry list of
annoyances (overlong or inappropriate sig lines, unsubscribe/advertising
footers, excessive whitespace, bad sig delimiters, etc.) that I found
too distracting to put up with so I wrote a few simple list-specific
scripts in Perl to clean up the mess. A side benefit I discovered when
testing everything was that I could reduce the mbox size of one list I'm
subscribed to by nearly 30% simply by removing the unsubscribe footers.
The format=flowed issues were last on my list so you're message was
indeed appreciated.
The only things separating me from a near-perfect world is dealing with
Outlook attributions and top-posting (not entirely satisfied with what
I've come up or seen thus far). There's also overly-short (<50) line
lengths (as soon as I can figure why people use such a setting),
paragraphs that have the first line indented, disregard for sentence
case when sentences are involved, unecessary "Hi's" and "Hello's" ...
but I'll quit while I'm ahead. ;-)
Cheers, and thanks again.
--
George