Hi

I've got a query regarding email formats and archives, something which I've
been meaning to find out the answer to for some time!

One of our list owners has voiced concern over emails that appear in the
archives (this is all viewing the archives via the web interface, btw) where
the body of the message is shown as one very long line of text,
necessitating the use of the horizontal scroll bar big-time. More
accurately, it appears that each paragraph has it's own line. This is
presumably something to do with no wrapping set in that particular format,
but what kind of format, encoding, charset or content-type (whichever is
applicable here?) causes this to happen? Are there any particular mail
clients that are more likely to be the culprit? (The list is configured to
only store short-headers so unfortunately I can't see what clients these ppl
are using).

Then there is another type of anomaly where the messages wrap in a peculiar
way. That is, most archived mails that "look right" wrap at somewhere
between about 70 & 77 characters, with one or two at around 54. However, one
I found seems to have been sent with some sort of wrap setting at about 100
characters. However, in the archives it displays with a wrap at ~77 causing
the remaining 23 characters to be displayed on the next line. So the
paragraphs alternate between lines of ~77 and ~23, as though a return
character has replaced the wrapping set by the client that sent it.

I've noticed some posts sent with content-type "text/html" show only the
html code in the archive.. reading about the language keyword, I assume this
is where no text alternative has been sent (eg: Eudora 3.x & Netscape
Messenger depending on settings).

Then I've found one or two completely garbled messages, as though encoded or
a file attachment, but no message body to support it. One of them had a
content type of "multipart/alternative", a block of garbled text and a link
at the bottom - "[text/html]".. when clicking on this link it shows the HTML
version in a separate window.. and it has a background image. So presumably
there was no text alternative, but why didn't it just reproduce the HTML
code instead or aswell as the encoded object?

I need to formulate a reply to the owner mentioned in para.1, so any
clarification on all this would be appreciated.

Regards

--
Spencer Warhurst
JISCmail Service Manager