Using "text_flowed"

On Tue, 08 May 2007 19:53:13 -0400, Mike Hunter wrote
(<slrnf423b9.hma.mhunter@fortytwo.lusars.net>):

> The problem I was having was that their mail clients were sending URLs
> purposfully broken across lines, and the patch above causes mutt to
> render such lines unbroken.
>
> I myself wasted a lot of time trying to understand why these emails were
> showing up in my inbox so obviously broken.

My problem is the opposite. My mails are OK when they leave my outbox;
they arrive broken.

The problem has already been diagnosed; it is caused by the broken
mail-server used by my recipient's ISP. The problem becomes manageable if
I opt to send my messages as "text/html". I am exploring other
possible strategies that would enable me to continue to use Mutt as my
sole MUA.

Felix


--
Felix Karpfen
Public Key 72FDF9DF (DH/DSA)

[ sorry for the delay, I don't read news often these days ]

Felix Karpfen <felixk@webone.com.au> wrote:

> Sadly, I think that I may have totally misunderstood the benefits of
> "format=flowed". The documentation, that I have found, had the unstated
> assumption that potential users have an email program that needs a
> Windows/XWindows environment. In such an environment, the benefits are
> significant; received emails look attractive, no matter what the size of
> the window is.

> Assuming the penny has finally dropped, my current understanding is that
> Mutt can be tweaked to _send_ plain text messages in "format=flowed". It
> does not _display_ messages in that format because it is designed to work on
> a console and not in an XWindows environment.

> Have I finally got the story straight?

Not really. The latest version of mutt can optionally also display
format=flowed just like GUI mailers by appropriate settings for
$wrap. For users with wide terminals under X11/console, this can improve
readability.

bye, Rocco
--
:wq!

Mike Hunter <mhunter@lusars.net> wrote:

> I have friends who send me format=flowed mail from (Apple's Mail.app),
> and I have applied the following patch to mutt to make it render them
> properly:

> http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~pdmef/m...ttng.ff.4.diff

> The problem I was having was that their mail clients were sending URLs
> purposfully broken across lines, and the patch above causes mutt to
> render such lines unbroken.

The URL is obsolete now that this feature is included in vanilla mutt.

> I myself wasted a lot of time trying to understand why these emails were
> showing up in my inbox so obviously broken. I could have understood if
> they were all one line, but they were clearly 80 column but kept on
> breaking the URLs...I finally figured out that this standard floating
> around would let you render the text "ok" for ignorant terminals and
> allow smart terminals to reformat it.

The problem is that apple mail (in my opinion) abuses or creatively uses
a feature of the update format=flowed specs, namely RfC 3676.

It's called "DelSp". Usually, format=flowed means that the sender leaves
re-flowable lines with a trailing space. The receiver concats those
groups of lines into new paragraphs it can reformat to whatever it
wants. "DelSp" enables this feature for languages which normally don't
use spaces.

The idea is that upon concatenation, these spaces are dropped so that

a $
b.

becomes 'ab' instead of 'a b'. What Apple mail does is set DelSp=yes and
put 2 spaces at the end of each line so that one of them survives
stripping. For long URLs and the like, it adds only one space like so:

http://long $
url

rendering to 'http://longurl'.

bye, Rocco
--
:wq!

Rocco Rutte <pdmef@gmx.net> disait le 05/14/07 que :

> [ sorry for the delay, I don't read news often these days ]
>
> Felix Karpfen <felixk@webone.com.au> wrote:
>
>> Sadly, I think that I may have totally misunderstood the benefits of
>> "format=flowed". The documentation, that I have found, had the unstated
>> assumption that potential users have an email program that needs a
>> Windows/XWindows environment. In such an environment, the benefits are
>> significant; received emails look attractive, no matter what the size of
>> the window is.
>
>> Assuming the penny has finally dropped, my current understanding is that
>> Mutt can be tweaked to _send_ plain text messages in "format=flowed". It
>> does not _display_ messages in that format because it is designed to work on
>> a console and not in an XWindows environment.
>
>> Have I finally got the story straight?
>
> Not really. The latest version of mutt can optionally also display
> format=flowed just like GUI mailers by appropriate settings for
> $wrap. For users with wide terminals under X11/console, this can improve
> readability.

my mutt (1.5.15) does not know of any wrap variable, nor does the
"reference" chapter of the documentation list "flowed" other than the
"text_flowed" variable.

--
Erwan

On 2007-05-14, Erwan David <erwan@rail.eu.org> wrote:
> my mutt (1.5.15) does not know of any wrap variable, nor does the
> "reference" chapter of the documentation list "flowed" other than the
> "text_flowed" variable.

http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#wrap
http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#id903472

Gufo
--
,___, Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is
(9v9) generally promoting a falsehood, isn't it?
(_^((\ .: May the owl be with you :.
-^-"-"-\\-^- http://gufo.dontexist.org

Gufo <gufo@people.it> disait le 05/14/07 que :

> http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#wrap

Oups. It seems I still had the doc for 1.5.10 on my disk...


--
Erwan

In article <20070509101302.slrn@krille.blacktrash.org>,
Christian Ebert <blacktrash@gmx.net> wrote:
>* Mike Hunter on Tuesday, May 08, 2007:
>> I have friends who send me format=flowed mail from (Apple's Mail.app),
>> and I have applied the following patch to mutt to make it render them
>> properly:
>>
>> http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~pdmef/m...ttng.ff.4.diff
>
>If you build your own, you can use the devel versions as well:
>
>Above patch is included in 1.5.15:
><ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt/devel/mutt-1.5.15.tar.gz>

>
>or in tip (Mercurial repo):
><http://dev.mutt.org/hg/>

What does that mean, "or in tip". What's "tip"?


>
>c
>--
>Python Mutt utilities <http://www.blacktrash.org/hg/muttils/>

David

* David Combs on Friday, May 25, 2007:
>> or in tip (Mercurial repo):
>> <http://dev.mutt.org/hg/>
>
> What does that mean, "or in tip". What's "tip"?

The (roughly) corresponding thing to cvs HEAD revision in
Mercurial (http://www.selenic.com/mercurial).

c
--
Python Mutt utilities <http://www.blacktrash.org/hg/muttils/>