Newline Escapes for Post by Email

[siderea]

Title
Newline Escapes for Post by Email

Short, concise description of the idea
Solve the problem of post-by-email interacting poorly with the email line-length-maximum specified in RFCs 2821 and 5321.

Full description of the idea
Post-by-email (w/o lj-raw) observes hard returns as meaningful formatting (i.e. makes them into
). Thus individual

Comments

[pauamma]

The way I interpret RFC 2046 section 4.1.1, if you have lines (or paragraphs) longer than that, your client should be using quoted-printable or base64. (Which it may be, so this could be a bug in your client, a bug in the LJ email gateway, or an interaction between not-quite-bugs in your client and the LJ email gateway.)

An alternative would be using format=flowed (RFC3676), which I think LJ does properly, as long as your client does. (IIRC, some clients incorrectly delete the end-of-line space on which format=flowed relies.) Again, if this doesn't work, it may be a bug on one side or an interaction between not-quite-bugs.

If you try (or tried) either, I'm interested in the results.

[siderea]

My client is not presently using MIME; I'm sending in plain text w/o MIME headers. Good old RFC 822. I'm not thrilled about having to come up with a special encoding just for email posting to LJ, but it's an interesting possibility. I wasn't aware of the possibility that LJ copes with format=flowed.

(To be clear, this truncation isn't a behavior of my client, it's Sendmail, the out-going SMTP server and still quite a common one. I researched why Sendmail is doing this, and the upshot is because the standard requires it. Discussed this with Support and they bounced me here.)

[siderea]

LJ does indeed respect Format=Flowed! I'm having a little trouble getting my client to leave the necessary spaces at the end of wrapped lines, but when I put them in manually, LJ does the right thing.

(Is this all just not a problem which other people ever run into? Or what do people who can't generate custom MIME headers in their email do?)

[pne]

I daresay that the huge majority of people who post by email use a client that does MIME.

[cesy]

Would this fix the problem where post-by-email from Gmail results in lots of extra newlines?

[siderea]

Dunno. Probably not if Gmail posts have "lots" of extra newlines. This results in very occasional newlines. Having not used Gmail to post, I'm not sure what it does, but it sounds like maybe it is line wrapping? In which case, this would not help.