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

1998-10-26 16:30:07
At 5:02 PM -0500 10/26/98, Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:

If you're wrapping your lines so each
is <80, what's the point of format=flowed?  Just so an MUA can take ONE
pre-flowed paragraph and re-write it as ANOTHER one?

Well, yes. Think of Format=Flowed as a kind of content-transfer-encoding. A generating agent can send paragraph text to a receiving agent, and both know it is paragraph text. However, if the message happens to get sent to an agent that doesn't know from paragraphs, it can still deal quite well with the message (at least as well as it can deal with anything else).

A generating agent that uses paragraphs internally should probably convert to Format=Flowed when it sends the message (that is, Format=Flowed is only used on the wire). A receiving agent can likewise convert Format=Flowed to paragraphs.

When generating Format=Flowed, each line is soft-wrapped by adding SPACE CRLF, so that each line is sent on the wire as less than 80 characters.