Word Wrapping in Archives

[John Delacour]

Date: Sun, 26 May 2002 23:00:33 -0400
From: "Farrell" <mfarrel2@tampabay.rr.com>

| Hi List. The other day I wrote about a report of no word wrapping in my posts.
| It appears the regular posts of mine wrap A-OK. I checked the archives and
| my posts are not wrapping - the whole paragraph is on one loooooooooong
| line. Any idea why this would happen and how I can fix it? 

I am taking the digest now, and the amount of html rubbish makes this a real pain to read.  I gave detailed instructions a while ago about how to avoid this but very few people have taken any notice.  That's up to them, but it just makes the digest and the archive very hard or impossible to read.

You are sending plain text all right, but you need to send MIME Quoted-Printable.  That way your lines will wrap in all circumstances and no special characters will be gobbled up in transit.  Special characters will appear encoded in the archive and lines will end in an "=" sign, but that is a small inconvenience for readers.  I won't go into the reasons for this but in brief only us-ascii characters are guaranteed safe passage through the mail system, so special characters and other things need to be encoded using us-ascii, and Q-P is the encoding which leaves the message largely readable even when it has not been decoded (as in the digest and archive).

If you're using OE. go to Tools->Options in the _main_ menu and click on the |Send| tab.  UNcheck the box saying  "Reply to messages in the format....", then click the radio button for Plain Text (NOT HTML).  Then click the button for Plain Text Settings.  In the new dialog, click MIME and select Quoted-Printable from the pop-up menu.

The other option is to select "none" for your encoding and then wrap your lines at 70 characters.  The only thing you need to be aware of if you choose this option is that any 8-bit characters you might include in your messages will get gobbled up or converted.  

Whoever does the archiving might consider producing "Mime Digests", but really subscribers ought to take the trouble to comply with long-established netiquette and set their mailers to post only plain text to mailing lists.

JD