Texting, texting, one two three

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

David Kramer wrote:
0....+....1....+....2....+....3....+....4....+....5....+....6....+....7....+....8
| OK, I just tried switching to 8-bit, I think.  Let's see how this text prints
| out.  I'm just gonna type some text here so it wraps for a couple of lines.
| I haven't been using KMail for that  long.  I have one more setting to try
| after this if it doesn't work.  Thanks for your indulgence.

Yup; that came through as plain, clean text.  Maybe you  should  have
included a few 8-bit chars, too, so we could see if those get damaged
in transit.

The text wasn't a  long  line,  so  something  is  still  doing  line
wrapping.  I included a "ruler" in the above, and I'd guess that your
line wrapping is happening at column 79 or 80.  For English text this
is  ok, of course, though it can do serious damage to stuff like code
or URLs.  When I have to deal with "intelligent" mailers,  I  usually
try  to  set  the line wrapping to something like 999 chars, so I can
send code samples without damage.  (And as you can  probably  see,  I
have a few text-formatting tools lying about.  ;-)

One thing that constantly impresses me is how, after decades of email
experience,  we  still  can't  even send simple text without it being
garbled by the software.  And it's getting worse ...