[PLUG] 80 characters

Felix Lee felix.1 at canids.net
Wed Nov 5 20:28:02 UTC 2003


Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com>:
> Ok, fine, but my mail reader does not have this problem. Every time someone 
> gripes about "your line breaks are too long" I see it as a problem with their 
> mail reader. Because mine wraps text just fine. So rather than crabbing at 
> people about their line breaks, how about using a mail reader that handles 
> the text intelligently? It's no different than telling people to use a less 
> virus-friendly mail reader, or one that handles HTML messages safely.

Because any time I try a new mail reading program, it causes
enough problems or slows me down enough that I end up reverting
back to my old system, which lets me triage incoming messages
very quickly in a way that makes sense to me.  (One keystroke per
message.  System is based on MH and Emacs, with MIME processing
disabled.)

Since I'm nobody in particular and there's no pressing reason for
us to communicate, feel free to ignore my peculiar formatting
desires.  Well, parts of the world are still being run by
technology dinosaurs who are comfortable with their own archaic
email systems, and it might be helpful to cater to their whims.

But I'm sure in another couple months they'll all be dead, so go
ahead and send email as RTF or RDF or PDF or whatever format
people think is cool these days.

hmm... I hear Microsoft Word is getting popular, maybe there
should be a mail program that will handle that intelligently and
safely.  The easiest way is probably: start up an isolated
virtual machine to render the document, then scrape bits off the
virtual screen.
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