[BUGS] format=flawed (was: Why is my mail being horribly newlined?)

[Andrew Reilly]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 05:49:44PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Friday, 14 December 2007 at  9:38:45 +1100, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 07:11:12AM +1100, Jerahmy Pocott wrote:
> >> Is there any way to disable using flowed format?
> >
> > I don't think so.  The right answer isn't to try to avoid flowed
> > format, but to embrace it, and live with the 75-column wrap that
> > Mail.app will give your messages automatically.
> 
> Never!  I want my messages to be displayed the way I formatted them,
> not the way some MUA things they should look.

Well, you're clearly not Mail.app's target demographic, then.
You probably hate that Web pages render according to the
viewer's preferences, too.  It comes down to the same thing:
80-column text windows are inappropriate models for a typeset,
arbitrary-sized display window, which is what the market (for
text production and viewing systems) has clearly selected,
nearly universally.

> > If you edit all of your text to be a long list of one-line
> > paragraphs, all shorter than 75 characters, then it'll probably stay
> > that way through the list manager, but why would you want that sort
> > of grief?
> 
> So that it will look the way you want it to look.  And with a good
> editor it's no work.

Why should you care how long the lines of your praragraphs
are?  It matters for some things, like program coding, but for
english text it hardly matters at all.  Sure, it's not much
work to have nicely-formatted plain-text paragraphs in vi or
emacs, but Mail.app doesn't give you access to either of those.
(and neither does Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution, or whatever
everyone uses these days.)

> If you have to use things like Apple Mail, you can probably work
> around this "feature" by setting the line length to some very long
> length.  That way it won't try to wrap.

Nope.  As far as I can tell, there isn't any way to tell
Mail.app how long plain-text lines should be split (not that
I've looked a whole lot.)  And if you *could* do that, it'd be
impossible to use, because every time you edited a paragraph
you'd have to go back and manually join and re-break every line.

Despite several deficiencies, I reckon that Mail.app is best GUI
e-mail program available, for most non-list uses.  Claws-mail
is getting close, but it's HTTP/RTF content-type handling is
still a bit clunky (and read-only), and it seems to require a
bit more manual intervention to keep IMAP folder hierarchies
synchronized.

I've yet to find a GUI mailer that can hold a candle to Mutt for
wading through mailing lists (why do none have "delete-thread"
mapped to a useful key sequence?) but there's no way that Mutt
is up to the task of modern corproate e-mail (i.e., formatted,
in-line images, stylized signature blocks, meeting requests,
other blaugh.)

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew