KIRK.TYM@OFFICE-2.ARPA (Kirk Kelley) (12/19/84)
Our message converter to RFC 822 folds everything in the body at 80 columns as a default (our paragraphs normally have no CRLFs in them). We use 80 columns instead of something shorter because our customers send tables formatted for 80 characters. We would prefer not placing ANY line breaks in the paragraphs of the body. [We would also prefer not getting ANY line breaks in paragrahs FROM the Internet, but thats another story.] This would mean we would send some "lines" in the body thousands of characters long. Are people going to suffer more from this as the default or from forcing line breaks at 80 or 72 or 60 or ???? Assuming SMTP knows how to deal with long lines, will mailers and mail readers break, or is this just a display aesthetics problem? We aim to please. -- kirk
Rudy.Nedved@CMU-CS-A.ARPA (12/20/84)
Kirk, I have had system give me huge lines, specifing a bad recipient address and then not accept what they sent me. I have system that get weird error failures....and if I look it turns out one of our users is sending a message with long lines...he or she generated because the terminal they have did auto-crlf...so they typed until they were done with the message. It sounds like you are hitting what Xerox hit along time ago. I would suggest that you either avoid sending out long lines or have a table of sites that "work" and wrap for all the other ones....I doubt you will get mail to work for more then 55% of the hosts....It is just to easy to have a static character buffer of a 1000 characters. I know our CMU Unix code does that (the subtle thing is it does not fail...it just adds new lines). Good luck, -Rudy
Tommy_Ericson__QZ%QZCOM.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA (01/08/85)
I don't agree with your wish to see all messages cut down to 80 col's. I might want to use the message network to send a document that is to be output on a lineprinter (or a 132-wide screen), I do not want the transporting network to intervene. The funtion of re-formatting a document should be a user-level application level feature, I might use different output medias from time to time.