Sending messages to iphone and fill-column

[Seth J. Rothschild]

Hi all,

This is a nontechnical, non-mu specific question which users on this
mailing list might have experience with.

Like most people, I'm often sending messages which get read on an iphone
or some android device. With auto-fill mode, this can display very
strangely.

That's suboptimal, but only really becomes a problem when I have lists
or quotes which display as

1. This is the first item on a list
of things.
2. This is the second thing on this
list

or
Alice> This is some important
information which you should repeat
Alice> in your message

which doesn't look professional enough for my liking. Have any of you
found a solution that you're happy with?

I've tried setting fill-column to twice the width of the iphone, which
helps a little for readability but is inconsistent. I'm concerned
setting fill-column to iphone width will make the messages hard to read
by computer.

Is a better solution to remove the fill altogether and let the
receiver's mail software sort out what it should look like?

I have put a fair amount of thought into this, and don't really know
what a good answer would look like so I thought someone here might have
an idea.

-Seth

[Ken Mankoff]

On 2015-07-07 at 10:32, Seth J. Rothschild <Seth.J.R...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Like most people, I'm often sending messages which get read on an
> iphone or some android device. With auto-fill mode, this can display
> very strangely.

Send messages in flowed format. It makes normal paragraphs appear correctly on all devices.

> 1. This is the first item on a list
> of things.
> 2. This is the second thing on this
> list

I don't mind my lists like that. Use blank line between items if you want clearer delimiters. If you want the second line indented, it isn't clear to me how you might specify that with plain-text unless you use a manual RETURN and tab/space to indent yourself, or send HTML emails with a style sheet. Simple text flowing and most email clients don't know the "1. " has special meaning for the following line.

> or
> Alice> This is some important
> information which you should repeat
> Alice> in your message

I haven't found an ideal solution to this, but what works for me is to change quoted sections (like your quotes above) to word-wrap with a fill-column set to 72. I do this with key-chord and hydra and the following setup which lets me pick flowed, unflowed, or truncated from an easy-access sub-menu:

(key-chord-define-global
",."
(defhydra kdm/fill-unfill-paragraph (:color blue)
"kdm/fill-unfill-paragraph"
("f" fill-paragraph "fill")
("u" unfill-paragraph "unfill")
("t" toggle-truncate-lines "toggle")
("q" nil "nil")))

It isn't ideal to have to type ",.f" on the quoted text, but it isn't too much of a hassle, and makes me better at cleaning up quoted sections, only including the quotes I reply to, and using "message-elides-region" more often...

hope this helps,

-k.

[Henrik Frisk]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Ken Mankoff <man...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2015-07-07 at 10:32, Seth J. Rothschild <Seth.J.R...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Like most people, I'm often sending messages which get read on an
> iphone or some android device. With auto-fill mode, this can display
> very strangely.

Send messages in flowed format. It makes normal paragraphs appear correctly on all devices.

Thanks for asking this Ken. A silly question: will I get flowed format just by turning off auto-fill?

/Henrik

[Ken Mankoff]

Not silly. I'm actually not certain how I got flowed format. Maybe it is there by default? I see that I have "(use-hard-newlines t 'guess)" commented out. Maybe I had disabled flow and commenting that line returned it?

-k.

[Joost Kremers]

On Wed, Jul 08 2015, Henrik Frisk <fri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for asking this Ken. A silly question: will I get flowed format just
> by turning off auto-fill?

Well, you might get something that looks like it but you won't get
proper format=flowed. The point is that format=flowed messages are still
hard-wrapped, so that they display correctly on mail readers that do not
support the format. The difference with the "traditional" message format
is that each newline is preceded by a space, unless it's to be
considered a hard newline. So lines ending in space+newline can be
reflowed, while lines ending in just newline cannot.

As far as I'm aware, Emacs doesn't support format=flowed, though I could
be mistaken.



--
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments

[Henrik Frisk]

Yes, I think you are right. I was struggling with this in MH-E too. What happens with messages sent "un-flowed" is that one some clients it shows up as one long line (which they are), right?

/Henrik

[Ken Mankoff]

On 2015-07-08 at 15:52, Henrik Frisk <fri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What happens with messages sent "un-flowed" is that one some clients
> it shows up as one long line (which they are), right?

Are you sure format=flowed is not supported? Gnus seems to say it is: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusFormatFlowed

I have checked my sent messages in GMail and iPhone, and the occasional mailing list archive, but not elsewhere. Yes I do think this paragraph is one long line. I hate seeing posts on message boards where people do that, and it scrolls far to the right. Do you know of any common email clients where this may be happening? If so, I think I will return to a hard 72 character wrap and let the iPhone users suffer.

-k.

[Joost Kremers]

On Wed, Jul 08 2015, Ken Mankoff <man...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2015-07-08 at 15:52, Henrik Frisk <fri...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> What happens with messages sent "un-flowed" is that one some clients
>> it shows up as one long line (which they are), right?
>
> Are you sure format=flowed is not supported? Gnus seems to say it is: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusFormatFlowed

Well, that page says that support in Gnus is minimal.

It also says:

,----
| Composing or replying an article with long lines will choose a more
| resilient encoding such as ‘quoted-printable’ by default.
`----

Which is exactly what's happened to your message: it's not
format=flowed, but quoted-printable. Quoted-printable[1] also has a way
to encode soft newlines. Looks like it's a decent way of sending
reflowable messages.

BTW, you can look at the raw message in mu4e if you press `.` in the
message view (*mu4e-view* buffer).

> I have checked my sent messages in GMail and iPhone, and the
> occasional mailing list archive, but not elsewhere. Yes I do think
> this paragraph is one long line.

It was in the text that you composed, and in the buffer in which mu4e
shows the message, but because of quoted-printable, the raw message is
wrapped. (Which, IIUC, is as it should be, since email messages should
be wrapped.)

The difference with format=flowed is that an email client must support
quoted-printable in order to display the message correctly, whereas
format=flowed was designed to allow the message to be displayed
correctly even by clients that don't support it.

Anyway, I guess the upshot for the OP is to just go ahead and write
emails with long lines. message-mode should handle the rest.

Joost



[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable