Excerpts from mail: 24-Aug-93 Re: MTAs and Content-Transf.. Steve
Dorner(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)co (830*)
How does one pleasantly format mail consisting largely of 76+ character
lines using quoted-printable? Is wrapping it at 38 the way to go?
Rhys' advice is good. Another strategy is to alter your UI to
discourage people from creating such lines in the first place. If, for
example, your UA does auto-wrapping as the user types text, then the
line breaks are really up to you anyway, so you don't ever need to have
such lines.
In a windowing environment, you could also just give the user a window
that was <= 76 characters wide for message composition....
The 76 character limit is pretty close to what most folks were doing in
practice anyway. If a UA generated lines that were 80+ characters, that
ALWAYS caused problems on many readers' terminals, and it practice it
was rarely done. So one approach would be to do whatever you did
before, but changing the constant 80 to 76 wherever it appears in your
program... :-) -- Nathaniel