On 25 Oct 2012, at 01:25, Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf(_at_)sandelman(_dot_)ca>
wrote:
Sabahattin Gucukoglu <listsebby(_at_)me(_dot_)com> wrote:
SG> * text/paragraphs (or whatever), a completely different identity that
violates the length limits
SG> Apple Mail and Microsoft use this text/paragraphs.
Do you think it would be worth writing a specification for text/paragraphs?
Only if we can get a whole bunch of defective code reading and writing it.
There might be a case for that, given the laziness they've demonstrated in
simply abusing text/plain, but it's also just possible that they might, just
might implement format=flowed instead. But it's unlikely. :-(
Heuristically, it's not that hard to identify, and a small patch for
mailman would at least mark email as being in that format, so that at
least, IETF lists could have email that complies to some standard.
It would be easier and simpler and probably more participant-friendly (though
not, see below, quite as good for changing the running code :-) ) to perform
imperfect conversions from text/paragraphs to text/plain; format=flowed. All
we've got to do is identify any line longer than 80 characters and, assuming
that it runs to the end of a paragraph at all times, add a forced soft line
break encoded using F=F's stuffing rules. Any line terminated before it's too
long is assumed to be a manually inserted hard line break.
Now that I come to think of it, now is the time to see if the Tcl MIME parser
will help me out writing a quick and dirty proxy server for my own machine …
(Whether or not we then drop email that doesn't have a text/plain part
is a second conversation)
You want to punish Apple and/or Microsoft? That's how to do it. :-)
Cheers,
Sabahattin