On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Paul Vixie <vixie(_at_)isc(_dot_)org> wrote:
format=flowed is now considered as the implicit default by some readers
notably apple's Mail.app, because so many senders use the format without
saying so in their mime headers. MH needs to adapt to current conditions.
I have reservations about that.
I have a pet peeve of MUAs not providing the proper headers, and I
blame Microsoft for this historically bad behavior that has lead
others to replicate this bad behavior.
Before format=flowed existed, you had MUAs auto-wrapping
text for text/plain message and rendering things in non-fixed
width fonts. Hence, it is hard to say if what is being seen
now is just a continuation of this, or if the underlying
data is truly format=flowed, but not labeled as such.
this probably means some heuristic where if the text looks like nonwrapped
paragraphs then format=flowed is presumed, unless some CLI option overrides
this. for example, a new show -autowrap / -noautowrap option defaulting
to -noautowrap if !isatty(STDOUT_FILENO) and to -autowrap otherwise.
I think any such heuristic should be disabled by default. nmh users
are not your typical email user. I do not like software that
formats messages in a matter that is different from what MIME headers
indicate w/o my explicit knowledge.
In the example you cite, I would have -noautowrap always be the
default.
Of course, if the MIME content-type header does state format=flowed,
then auto-wrapping should occur as defined by the format=flowed
spec. For cases when output is redirected to a non-tty device,
you may need an option that allows one to specify the max column
count so nmh would know what the wrap boundary is.
--ewh
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