Re: File Systems Compared

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Alexander Staubo wrote:

> Care to post these numbers *without* word wrapping?

Brian's message was sent with format=flowed and therefore it's easy to
re-assemble into original form if your software understands that. I just
checked with two e-mail clients (Thunderbird and Pine) and all his
bonnie++ results were perfectly readable on both as soon as I made the
display wide enough. If you had trouble reading it, you might consider
upgrading your mail client to one that understands that standard.
Statistically, though, if you have this problem you're probably using
Outlook and there may not be a useful upgrade path for you. I know it's
been added to the latest Express version (which even defaults to sending
messages flowed, driving many people crazy), but am not sure if any of the
Office Outlooks know what to do with flowed messages yet.

And those of you pointing people at the RFC's, that's a bit hardcore--the
RFC documents themselves could sure use some better formatting.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=134270&action=view has a
readable introduction to the encoding of flowed messages,
http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html gives some history to how
we all got into this mess in the first place, and
http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html also has some helpful (albeit out of date in
spots) comments on this subject.

Even if it is correct netiquette to disable word-wrapping for long lines
like bonnie output (there are certainly two sides with valid points in
that debate), to make them more compatible with flow-impaired clients, you
can't expect that mail composition software is sophisticated enough to
allow doing that for one section while still wrapping the rest of the text
correctly.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD