> 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.