Comments on: Email Netiquette – Part 2

By: nah

nah — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 07:56:52 +0000

I use gnus, which actually warns me if I have long lines. But I’m starting to think it might be just as well to use unbroken lines, because of mobile devices with small screens. Even the simplest of clients can reflow text in a received email so that it appears as max 80, but if you send pre-broken at 80 and the screen-width is max 40, you get these ugly linebreaks at all the wrong places.

OTOH, it might not matter much in a year or two, since small screens seem to be on their way out again, and even the smallest of phones are getting really high resolutions.

By: David Chiles

David Chiles — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 10:07:42 +0000

Netiquette is very important.

For more information about netiquette, visit, http://www.networketiquette.net.

Everyone could use a little netiquette : )

By: David Chiles

David Chiles — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:21:54 +0000

Netiquette is very important!

By: Janne

Janne — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 07:54:59 +0000

But, Aaron, none of your recipients need you to reflow your text. You are helping nobody. Everyone of your recipients already reflow your text to a convenient width even if you don’t insert line breaks. So you help nobody at all. The gain for you or any recipient of reflowing is zero. You are only adding a negative for a portion of your recipients without adding a positive for anybody.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:21:34 +0000

I shouldn't be catering my email usage to the minority of users who might be using screen resolutions smaller than 80 characters. I should be composing my message that has the greatest impact on the largest number of users. And studies have shown that wrapped text between 60-90 characters improves readability, accuracy and comprehension. I'm not going to turn on flowed text, because maybe 1/100 of the people receiving my mail might be using a width smaller than 80 characters. That makes zero sense.

By: Janne

Janne — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:13:22 +0000

(Trying with It’s All Text, and editing with gedit. See if it linebreaks then)”Again though, unless people are on screen resolutions that are smaller than 80 characters [...]“Which, again is what some people have, and not because they are ornery but because they ahve no choice. They may use a featurephone that simply can’t show 80 characters wide. They may have bad eyesight and need to zoom the text really big. And you, as the sender, is gaining nothign at all by setting those line breaks. Zero. The only effect is to make your emails hard to read for a minority of users. For no benefit at all.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:44:21 +0000

@Janne- So, after running some SQL queries, the only users who are having a problem with the line breaks are Firefox 3.6.9 users on Ubuntu. Using any other Firefox version, a different browser, or a different operating system seems to not be affected. With that, I have been fixing comments, inserting line breaks in both yours, and others’ comments, for this reason.

I don’t know if it’s WordPress to blame with that user agent string, or if there is a problem with Firefox 3.6.9 on Ubuntu. Definitely worth looking into, although I don’t know if I’ll get to it any time soon.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:31:15 +0000

@Janne- Also, in regards to broken paragraphs, it seems to only be happening to a handful of comments. Many comments seem to be coming through just fine. I wonder if it has something to do with the browser being used? Check some of my Ramadan posts. Many people commenting without a problem of creating paragraphs with two line breaks.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:22:27 +0000

@Janne- Well, it's not Mutt that is inserting the hard line breaks, but Vim, the editor of choice that I use to compose my messages.

:set tw=72

Again though, unless people are on screen resolutions that are smaller than 80 characters or they are intentionally manipulating the message to display the mail in a manner different than the sender intended.

By: Janne

Janne — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 10:39:16 +0000

Aaron, then mutt is most certainly breaking email for people. Are you sure Mutt is actually inserting hard line breaks into the text stream it sends out, and not simply breaking lines for your benefit?

This is exactly the same as coding a web page for a specific screen width and character size. Fine for some users, breaks the page for others, for no discernible benefit on the part of the sender other than a mostly illusory sense of control.

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Blogging Tips for the DubLi Associate | Articlewrap.com — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:35:27 +0000

[...] Aaron Toponce : Email Netiquette – Part 2 [...]

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 08:23:46 +0000

@Janne- No, I am definitely implying that line breaks are inserted. For both Thunderbird and Mutt, which I use both heavily, when my line reaches 72 characters, it wraps. If the word passes the 72 character limit, then it wraps to the next line. So, some lines will be 72 characters wide, some 69, some 71, etc. all ending on the word that most closely reaches the 72 character wide limit.

By: big package

big package — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 05:10:08 +0000

If your IMAP server and your email client both support it, there are ways for the client to just get the email without the attachment. There are also IMAP extensions to get the server to convert the attachment between formats.

By: Janne

Janne — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 02:03:39 +0000

Aaron, maybe I’m misunderstanding you. I read your post to mean that you recommend actually inserting line breaks around (somewhat before) 80 characters, so the paragraph is already wrapped by the sender when the recipient receives it. This of course breaks any email client that can’t show at least 80 characters wide lines (such as small-screen clients on phones), and breaks it for any user that for whatever reason isn’t able to read when characters are small enough to show 80 characters wide text.

No email client I have seen will insert line breaks; the few email I see that have hardcoded line breaks seem to have been generated by somebody using a separate editor or similar, then pasted the text into their client, linebreaks and all. But if you don’t mean inserting line breaks, I’m not sure what you actually suggest.

By: David

David — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 01:26:11 +0000

Okular is able to open xps files. I do my taxes on Windows, and unfortunately, can’t save the receipt as pdf, but have to print to xps. Ironically, Vista’s XPS viewer craps out whenever I try to open xps files. The only way for me to view them was to find an open viewer on Ubuntu that could open them. I’m still running Karmic, so maybe other viewers can open them now too.