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Dealing with format=flowed

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nate

09 Jul, 2009 02:28 AM

I'm curious if you guys have spent any time thinking about format=flowed in email messages? I believe I see you guys have the same thing going on as a bunch of us parsing mail with tmail. Attactched is a screenshot of an tender issue that's been updated via email (Mail.app) and you can see the text is wrapping in a way that wasn't meant to be wrapped by the author.

As a message comes in from say Apple's Mail.app, that client sets the content type to:

    Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII;
format=flowed;
delsp=yes

format=flowed softwraps the content of the message, and receiving mail clients are supposed to be able to unwrap it. tmail then should maybe be the responsible party unwrapping it by removing "soft line breaks".

All this business is the subject of http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt and http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt

"Interpreting Format=Flowed" is an important section then probably.

Anyways, just curious. I'm going to start chewing on these rfc specs to figure out how to properly unwrap this text.

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1. 1 Posted by Kyle Neath (Git... on 09 Jul, 2009 03:04 AM

   

   We don't do anything with it right now -- but you're right, we should fix the TMail parsing to do that.

   P.S. If you're ever curious about our email parsing, you browse the source of http://github.com/entp/astrotrain/tree/master which is the app that receives email and passes it on to Tender.

   Thanks!
   Kyle
   

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2. 2 Posted by System on 09 Jul, 2009 03:05 AM

   

   A Lighthouse ticket was created for this discussion

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3. 3 Posted by rick on 09 Jul, 2009 03:10 AM

   

   I've known about the issue for awhile, but it wasn't a real issue for us until we stopped running emails through the markdown processor. We recently turned off markdown for emails (mainly so things like stack traces and whatnot aren't messed up), and now this issue is rearing its ugly head.

   To be honest, it's not a big deal to me at the moment. We have bigger email-related issues that are encoding/charset related, or dealing with text/html-only messages. It would be nice to get resolved though, and mikel on github has been receptive about my issues and patches. I'd like to tackle it, but currently working out a way to make the reply tracking much smarter...

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4. Nicole closed this discussion on 10 Dec, 2009 09:13 PM.