I'd like to get some advice on a problem that many people
using our product have commented on.
Currently, when sending Internet Mail with long lines, we
default to using QP encoding so that MIME aware clients
can unwrap the lines, and display as required on their
viewers. (We use 140chars as the threshold)
We have received numerous complaints (most people assumed
that this was a bug) from people that use non-MIME aware
apps about the equal signs on every line.
I thought about this for awhile, and hoped the issue may
be resolved by using a prologue informing people that this
message was a MIME message, and they may see some
irregular things in it. Therefore every message that we
send, is sent using the multipart type, so that we could
use the prologue.
This is catch22, since people complained about the use of
multipart, even when we could have sent just text/plain
messages. (They also complained about the contents of the
prologue, but thats another issue)
I see the choices for our product as follows, and would
like your feedback on what you consider the right choice,
or suggestions on doing something better.
a)We provide an option to hard wrap lines, therefore we
don't use QP encoding to deal with the line wrapping issue
at all.
i.e. CTE is 7-bit unless QP is required for some other
reason
b) We just hard wrap without an option even when using QP
(An option is probably a good thing to turn this to use QP
wrapping)
c) We leave things the way they are.
d) We don't send the prologue, and hope that the world
will move to MIME, and this becomes a non-issue.
I really only consider option a, or b as viable for our
user population, but I'll wait to hear back from people
before I commit.
Thanks,
-Suki
Sukvinder S. Gill
Microsoft Corporation
E-Mail - sukvg(_at_)microsoft(_dot_)com
Tel: 206-936-9761