> From:         "Victor S. Miller" <VICTOR@YKTVMZ>
> Subject:      Folded lines
> The recent exchange about UUCP messages (with a sample), prompted me to
> recall a suggestion I had made a while ago (I don't remember where, so
> it might be new to this audience) about how mailers in bitnet should deal
> with lines of length > 80.  My suggestion is this: any line of length > 80
> should be split up into pieces, the first of length 80, and subsequent
> pieces of length 79 (or less).  The first character on the second and
> succeeding lines should be a backspace.  Since it is impossible for text
> files to have that combination (or highly unlikely, since nothing is really
> impossible), this shouldn't have any impact on existing files, and would
> be trivial to put back together or create.
>                       Victor
 
Fundamentally this is a good idea for message text.  Just where along the
process of getting mail should this happen?  How would it be displayed on
my IBM (the real thing) 3178-2?
 
There might be more problems than you bargained for if this logic is applied
to the headers.  For the header (anything before the first blank line) a blank
should be added instead of a backspace, but other than that, 79 characters is
good enough.  Even FAL does NOT do this at the 1.1 level.