Re: Balsa can't download a mail with a long line, gets stuck in endless dup-creating loop.

[Rob Landley <rob landley net>]

On 10/28/2012 01:27:42 PM, Albrecht Dreß wrote:
> Am 27.10.12 19:21 schrieb(en) Rob Landley:
> > Apparently Format=Flowed is checked by default. I had word wrap  
> > checked because the incoming message crash means that if I don't,  
> > there's the possibility balsa couldn't download messages I sent to  
> > myself. (That was my understanding, anyway. I didn't want to risk  
> > hitting any more line length limitations in the send/receive logic.)
>
> I guess you have to distinguish two different line lengths here:
>
> - the /displayed/ line length, which may be unlimited and
> - the /transmitted/ line length for which according to RFC 2822,  
> sect. 2.1.1 the following applies:
>
>    There are two limits that this standard places on the number of
>    characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than
>    998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding
>    the CRLF.
>
> If a broken MUA violates the latter restriction, this might cause  
> trouble.

An obscure little thing called "apple mail", the stock email client for  
the mac. Not like anybody out there uses macs...

> Of course, Balsa (read: the underlying gmime lib) strictly follows  
> the 78 char rule.

Does this mean balsa will always break inlined patches, so if I have to  
send a patch to linux-kernel I can't do it via balsa?

> If you look at the message source (Ctrl-U), e.g. of this message, you  
> see the "folding white space" (in qp encoding a "=20<CR><LF>" at the  
> end of each line) as to fulfil the '2822 requirements within long  
> lines.  The quoted part contains the quote mark at the beginning of  
> each folded line so stupid MUA's display it properly.  Balsa (and  
> others, like kmail) glue them together as defined in RFC 3676.
>
> > As a test, I'm typing a paragraph I'll go back and insert words  
> > (such as these) into the middle of, to see if it can sanely wordwrap  
> > them. Hey, it looks like it's now handling it reasonably. (I would  
> > have thought that the wordwrap at X characters thing would have been  
> > applied to mail _after_ composer was done with it. Live and learn.)
>
> Well, I must admit that the naming of these options is really  
> confusing... :-/
>
> > I selected the above two lines and hit ctrl-R and it added a blank  
> > line after them but otherwise left things unchanged. In my current  
> > view, there are only two > characters and the only clue it's reply  
> > text is the color coding. But I guess that's an aesthetic choice.  
> > (I'm used to reply text being displayed with > at the start of the  
> > line even if the composer is logically treating it as one big  
> > paragraph.)
>
> One thing kmail (I have to use it at work as to have access to the  
> Groupware calendars) does better here is that if you insert a new  
> line into a quoted paragraph, *both* split parts have the same  
> quoting depth.  In Balsa, the second parts is unquoted.

I used kmail for years, but it's glued to KDE (which I stopped using at  
4.0) and got sucked up into the hairball of Koffice (which bundles a  
bunch of other apps I don't want into the same gui and makes it hard to  
ignore them).

> Regarding the display, it would be better to have the vertical bar as  
> in the text display.  I implemented the latter ages ago, and I don't  
> recall how difficult it would be in the composer (i.e. why I didn't  
> add it there).
>
> If I find some time, I'll look into both issues!
>
> Best,
> Albrecht.

I note that my build-from-source effort is still stuck on "I can't  
switch off the unnecessary spell checker bolted into the thing because  
--without-gtkspell still wants aspell, and even though I installed  
aspell-dev it still says I didn't".

Oh, random rough edge du jour: if I'm reading a message and I change my  
sort type, the display is not recentered around the message I'm  
viewing. I.E. I just did "sort by subject" to see if there were any  
other recent replies to this thread that might render the above  
paragrapph moot, and scrolling around in the 677 messages in "inbox" (I  
haven't exited balsa to run my filters yet) I can't find the currently  
selected message after the sort. (It's still displaying it, but  
changing sort type lost track of it.)

Thunderbird and kmail both had the currently highlighted message still  
onscreen after the sort...

Rob