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http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html also has some helpful (albeit out of date in 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@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD