further random questions from the newly-unemployed

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

Servers generally do not alter the body of an email message. This is 
normally done by the sending email client. RFC822 defines a long line being 
greater than either 65 or 72 characters. The receiving email client may 
also reformat the body. When I send resumes, I generally use MS Word 
document format as an attachment. Since I deal with a lot of headhunters, I 
am pretty confident that this is ok. I also rarely send text other than 
plain ASCII. Nearly every email program can handle attachments, so if you 
want to prevent the reformatting of your ASCII text, send it as  binary 
attachment. Lines are never wrapped.

"Jim Long" wrote:

>   One of the dangers of text format email is that long
>   lines get broken in different places by different email
>   servers or programs resulting in alternating long and
>   short lines -- unless you preformat the text with short
>   enough lines that no email server will break it into
>   shorter lines. (I don't really understand WHY that
>   happens.) So, my question is what is a safe longest line
>   length to use? In this email I am trying a length of 60
>   characters, indented. If an indented paragraph were too
>   long it would really be a mess after the lines got
>   broken.
> 
>   Every time I send text email I pre-format it using
>   macros in gvim (VI Improved on Windows). The J key is
>   used to join lines, so I thought the ctrl-J would be a
>   natural for breaking them. Since autoindent is on by
>   default in gvim if the first line of a paragraph is
>   indented each following line will indent too. I just
>   added a macro for the ctrl-K key to add "> " to the
>   beginings of lines of text I am replying to, as in the
>   quote from David, above. 
>  
>   Here is the text of my email formatting macros from
>   _vimrc, in case anyone is interested, or wants to
>   comment. 
>   map <C-J> 61\|Bhr<cr>
>   map <C-K> 0i> <esc>61\|Bhr<cr>
>   map <C-S> :%s/> //g 
> 
> Jim Long  
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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