[Email-SIG] header folding

[R. David Murray]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:18:36 +0900, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> It's not clear to me what exactly the policy knob you're talking about
> is for body text.  There is no policy really allowed if quoted-
> printable is being used.  So the policy knob is whether to use
> quoted-printable to limit physical line length?

Well, I have *not* looked at this in detail yet.  By default nothing
is changed (refold_source='none').  My preliminary thought was that if
refold_source is 'long', and we come across a body that is wider than
the RFC limit (or if the application wants to reformat to a different
limit), we could reconstruct the body and refold it to the new limit.
Perhaps this is not practical/useful; as I say I haven't gotten there
yet :)

> The only reason I can think of for having separate controls is that
> many MUAs mishandle quoted-printable in the body text.  Patches don't
> apply, one-time-key URLs in links get broken and fail to be
> recognized.  On the other hand, header-folding rarely has such
> consequences in my experience.

That's an interesting point.  So perhaps I should rename the control
'header_source_refold'.  I hate making the name longer, but anything
less would be ambiguous, and I've already got other controls with long
names :(.  On the other hand, we could also provide a separate control
for whether or not quoted printable bodies in particular were folded,
and consider both controls when deciding what to do with a particular
quoted printable body.  I favor the latter at the moment.

--
R. David Murray           http://www.bitdance.com