On Wed, 3 Mar 1999 10:22 -0800, Larry Osterman (Exchange) wrote:
Subject: This is a message with an indescribably long subject. I don't know
why anyone would ever want to have a subject that is this long, but there
are people who will want this.
Subject: This is a message with an indescribably long subject. I
don't know why anyone would ever want to have a subject that
is this long, but there are people who will want this.
I believe that Exchange puts spaces in when it folds the lines, but it's
entirely possible that some client is changing the spaces into tabs (it's
all LWSP, right?). What I cannot explain is the level of degradation that
your subject is showing, but it's possible you are seeing a combination of
these two effects (the "Re:" expansion and the long subject line expansion.
Improper unfolding causes the problem.
Here is why someone might be tempted to unfold incorrectly.
Let's say you're trying to send a subject line like:
Subject: buying a car in the countryside
^^ ^^ ^^
where each of the areas marked with "^" are two spaces. Pretend it
is a really long header and something along the way decides to
wrap it like this (obviously nothing would wrap it this tightly, but
I'm using a simple example because of the line-length limitations of
email).
Subject: buying a car
in
the
countryside
when it gets unwrapped it will be unwrapped as:
Subject: buying a car in the countryside
which isn't what the sender sent!
An implementor trying to preserve the original spacing would wrap it
like this:
Subject: buying a car
in
the
countryside
which would be unwrapped by that implementor's software like this:
Subject: buying a car in the countryside
which is exactly what the user sent. Happy implementor!
But this isn't the correct way to unwrap? Unwrapping should yield one
space between characters, not multiple spaces.
There isn't a way to prserve multiple spaces in a wrapped subject line
when the wrapping occurs at one of the multiple spaces.
-Dan Wing