Re: Message Formatting

[warren@domain.elided (Warren Nicholson)]

Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 23:03:33 -0500
From: "Damon R. Kane" <X19Fan@domain.elided>

<<<<
Why is it that only recently my e-mail shows up on the digest with funny
line breaks and equal signs all over the place?
>>>>>

Damon, 

Compuserve has an embedded format in their mail text. All mail 
server software does. 

However, nearly all mail routing on the internet is done with 
UNIX boxes using MIME encoding. One of the routers CompuServe 
passes your mail thru is truncating each line at 75 characters 
and then sticking a " = " character before the carriage return 
character to indicate line wrap. 

If knowing Why it's happening doesn't make you feel any smarter
- nothing makes me feel smarter any more - the bottom line is 
that if you hit the RETURN key on your keyboard before 75 
characters, it won't be a problem. 

I type this, and all messages, with the lines ending at 65 -
70 characters, precisely for that reason. Makes the mail 
look purty. 

Thank goodness you are not one of those annoying folks whose 
mail is set for MicroSoft messaging and everyone on whatever 
list you post has to see each message twice, with the second 
one filled with HTML markers.

0 _ \
|   /

Warren (UNIX Geek) Nicholson 
Santa Clara, CA   USA