Again, over here people pay per part. One SMS part has a fixed cost,
billed (mostly) to the sender. Very long SMS contain multiple parts.
If other telephone networks follow this model, then it makes more
sense to let people specify the maximum number of parts allowed,
which dirctly translates to money, cutting the message after that.
What good is a limit of 170 characters, if 1-160 characters cost one
unit and 161-320 cost two units? Then again, I may give a message with
many UTF-8 characters that will be dropped when converting to IA5, so
people won't understand why sometimes 200 characters "fit" in 170 octets.
With parts, they indirectly say "you can spend this much money" and do
not need to care about encoding or number of octets.
I'm in the UK so it's the same for me too. You are detailing the exact reason
why I proposed :limit being a message limit rather than a character limit
(which was in the original I-Draft). My "message" is your "part", we're
gunning for the same thing. :o)
If we are to offer a standard, then maybe we should just drop the "To"
as well, as in the vast majority of cases I'd imagine users will know
who the message was sent to.
Not if they have multiple mailboxes, like office and private.
So will that be more common? With only 140 8 byte characters to play with,
using up approximately 40 for what might always be the same might be quite a
lot.... Ideally we'd pick a default which had no internationalisation issues,
so maybe not even use the word "From".... But perhaps the subject has no place
in the draft anyway...
Nigel