[Alpine-info] Re: Gmail server problem with Alpine

[Mike Miller]

On Mon, 9 Mar 2009, Matt Ackeret wrote:


> On Sun, 8 Mar 2009, Mike Miller wrote:

>

>> It helps a lot but it is really pretty complicated.  I just want my 

>> email to work and not mess things up so that the recipient sees 

>> something different than the sender.  Strangely, that is very hard to 

>> arrange.

>

> It seems to me like turning on:

>      [X]  Do Not Send Flowed Text

>

> very easily solves the problem.  One may be accused of Ludditism because 

> of it, but users of text-based email programs "in this day and age" are 

> probably already generally thought of as that, so no extra problem is 

> caused.  I definitely have that turned on, for generally the same 

> reasons you do.



I decided not to go that route for a couple of reasons.  One reason is 
that many more people these days, even me, are using little devices to 
read email -- things like iPhones or Treos.  The format=flowed helps wrap 
the lines nicely for those little devices.

The second reason is that I figured yesterday that I can get the 
formatting I want in my little text tables, probably for every recipient, 
simply by ensuring that every line begins with two or more spaces.  It 
isn't hard to add a little more padding, so that's what I'll do.

So, based on my recent findings as presented in the immediately preceeding 
paragraph, I will retract my claim above that it "is very hard to arrange" 
(for sender and recipient to see the same thing) because I think padding 
with extra spaces when needed will do well enough for me.

My guess is that many of our problems with email are really caused by a 
bunch of powerful competing software developers (big companies, mostly) 
that all want to control standards and intentionally fail to interoperate 
with competitors.

We may seem to be luddites for using a text-based interface, but 
plain-text email is a really good thing and recipients will always be able 
to read it quite easily.  Few things annoy me more than a 100KB MS-Word 
attachment with simple unformatted text in it, especially when it is 
distributed on a list to hundreds of recipients.  More people need to get 
a clue.

Mike