ietf-822
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Re: Format=Flowed and Non-ASCII Characters

1998-10-26 09:21:42
At 10:40 PM 10/25/98 -0800, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
But at that point I hardly need 
format=flowed, since I can now safely transport lines of any length.

That's not quite right.  Format=flowed is a semantic indicator, not an
encoding method.

When you send a long line without saying "format=flowed", the official
semantics (grumble, grumble) are that it's a very long line, and the
receiving mailer should treat it as such (eg, by applying a horizontal
scroll bar or something).

Adding "format=flowed" means that long lines are to be treated as
paragraphs (eg, by wrapping them to the display width).

If you're sending normal text that you want a receiving mailer to present
as wrapped paragraphs, you should use format=flowed, whether or not you
also use a content-transfer-encoding.