On the Outlook menu, make sure that Work Offline is not checked.Outlook 2011 on Mac OS X, v14.1.3, for whatever reason, still does not properly support “format=flowed” content-type or “quoted-printable” extensions for plaintext emails. Solution: Verify that Outlook is online. For information about checking the status of your network connections, see Mac OS Help. On a local network, see if you can access intranet sites. Use a web browser to see if you can access web sites.Microsoft Outlook app is available on iPhone, Android, and Windows operating systems.This is the last straw. The size of the latest downloadable installer is MB5(10). The software is included in Developer Tools. This Mac download was checked by our antivirus and was rated as safe. Microsoft Outlook for Mac is available as a free download on our application library. This appears to be a regression from Entourage, as far as I recall, which never handled plaintext quite this badly, and this is also despite Microsoft’s promises to have “implemented format=flowed”.About Outlook : Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server for multiple users in an organization, such as shared mailboxes and calendars, Exchange public folders, SharePoint lists.This draft has to be re-wrapped manually, by the tedious process of deleting the newline-based hard line breaks from every line following in the paragraph. I start with a perfectly good reply saved as a draft:See that third line? Thanks to the hard line breaks inserted by Outlook (even at composition stage), the line wrap has been mangled. Breakfast mac n cheeseHere’s a really simple illustration of the problem, from the receiver’s end:See how the URL, which was composed as one plaintext line, gets split up into two lines?Here is another example, purely from the editor UI (and not even being sent yet). (480) 998-8521 Ivory tower is a rosy outlook. Outlook.com and the Outlook mobile appsPerception will give following error code associated with yourself if working. If it looks good in your browser, there’s a decent chance it will look good here.The IssueBack when email was first devised, servers didn’t have a lot of memory, and people had pretty tiny terminals with fixed line widths and not a whole lot of processing power to deal with it. Obviously no one at Microsoft sends plaintext emails anymore. Imagine doing that in a long paragraph, from the first line.To add insult to injury, there is not even a “re-wrap” functionality in the editor, to at least solve this user-interface level problem (as opposed to the protocol level problem).
But now we write some pretty long lines without linebreaking ourselves, so something magical has to happen in the email client itself, like Outlook 2011.The naive solution, of course, is to slap arbitrary line breaks into the user’s email message at every 78 characters, which is what ye olde email clients (looking at you, pine — how did I ever put up with you…) from yesteryears did (and Outlook 2011 still does). And it’s a fine, conservative design model. This limitation is hardly useful in the modern age, but persists since it’s part of the standard. ReceivingImplementations would do well to handle an arbitrarily large numberOf characters in a line for robustness sake…The more conservative 78 character recommendation is to accommodateThe many implementations of user interfaces that display theseMessages which may truncate, or disastrously wrap, the display of…it is encumbant upon implementations which display messagesTo handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line(certainly at least up to the 998 character limit) for the sake ofBasically, the SMTP server can count on messages that come in 80 characters per line (and always less than 1000 characters per line), and email clients can trust that they only have to render up to the 78th column of text. Each line of characters MUST be no more than998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excludingThe 998 character limit is due to limitations in many implementationsWhich send, receive, or store Internet Message Format messages thatSimply cannot handle more than 998 characters on a line. Outlook Error Code 998 Full Width OfThis format of email is characterized by the content-type:Content-type: text/plain charset=US-ASCII format=flowedIn format=flowed emails, the sending and receiving email clients are allowed to reflow the text based on user linebreaks. This should not be allowed to happen.Because this naive solution was not perfect, an extension was proposed as RFC 2646. Users who copy-paste the two lines will end up getting a 404, due to that stupid inserted newline in the middle of it. Even in the case of source code, it should also not be mangled by the insertion of arbitrary line breaks in them — what if newlines are meaningful in this language, and the author used more than 78 characters per line? The example with the URI is illustrative of this problem — the URI got an arbitrary newline in the middle, destroying its meaning. With the exception of source code, it is almost always better for the email client to use the full width of their display, however many characters that might be. Proponents argue that the email will “always look the same” on all devices, including those limited to 78 chars per line.I (and many others), on the other hand, think the spirit of the RFC is to allow the actual handling client to decide where to break lines. On the receiving end, the client processes this character as a no-op and concats the line back together for display.Outlook doesn’t do that either. In this model, soft line breaks are sent explicitly with the character “=” representing it, breaking at the usual 70-odd character column. It just inserts some line breaks and calls it a day.An alternative, implemented by Apple’s Mail.app, is to send messages with the Content-Transfer-Encoding header set to “quoted-printable”, as per RFC 2045. It does not appear that Outlook 2011 deals with any of this. Modern email clients like Thunderbird, designed for user comfort and the generous system limitations of the year 2011, implement this standard.Content-type: text/plain charset="US-ASCII"Not even an option to change that behavior. Rufus for the macOutlook 2011 appears to do even worse than Entourage 2008 at this problem, by not dealing with it at all. For those of us who do think HTML emails are an atrocity to be used sparingly, if at all, the idiosyncrasies of plaintext email have to be addressed. ConclusionThe world moved on and adopted HTML emails, which doesn’t have this newline problem.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorTim ArchivesCategories |