On Sunday, 5 July 1998 at 16:00:36 -0400, Malartre wrote:
> Greg Lehey wrote:
>>
>> On Sunday, 5 July 1998 at 0:45:09 -0400, Malartre wrote:
>>> Does there is any official page on how to wrap line in e-mails?
>>> 72 characters or 76 characters?
>>>
>> Where to wrap is a matter of taste. Some people put in valid claims
>> for lines as long as 110 characters, which I think is far too large.
>>
>> From a comfort point of view, I'd say that 90 is getting too much.
>> From the viewpoint of many people who don't use X, 79 is the limit:
>> after that, lines start wrapping. I personally use 70 characters,
>> though I wonder if it wouldn't be better to use 75.
>>
>> In case you're interested, I've got a fair collection of suggestions
>> at http://www.lemis.com/email.html.
>
> My question was not "how do I wrap line" but "how much characters by
> line". Me and Dag-Erling Coidan where talking about
> http://www.aei.ca/~malartre/how-to-ask-en.html
> http://www.aei.ca/~malartre/how-to-ask-fr.html
> I was saying to wrap line to 72 characters in the body of the mail, but
> he say than the .signature should be of 4 line X 76 characters(USENET).
> Well, I would like to know if there is a place where there is
> recommandation on that subject.
I haven't heard of the USENET recommendation, but I don't think
there's much to choose from in the range 70 to 76. I think that 4
lines of .sig should be a maximum, though, not a requirement.
Since you've got me going here, let me list my pet gripes, in rougly
descending order:
1. Unwrapped lines (one line per paragraph).
2. Long/short syndrome (one long line, one short line).
3. Messages with uneven quotes (usually the result of a buggy mailer
trying to wrap quoted text).
4. Messages with lots of extraneous garbage from earlier messages.
5. Messages with the text out of order ("answer before the question".)
If this doesn't make any sense, check out
http://www.lemis.com/email.html again. Microsoft mailers tend to be
good at (1), (2) and (3). I no longer answer messages which arrive
this way.
Greg
--
See complete headers for address and phone numbers
finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message