[ale] Odd WTF question

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 08/14/2011 06:54 PM, Drifter wrote:
> Recently wrote a longish letter to the president of my Condo Assoc. and
> 
> copied my wife, who uses a Mac.

Is it a Mac running OS X, or an older version of the MacOS?  Older
versions of MacOS used a different newline format; OS X uses UNIX-style
newlines.

> As in this note, I placed an extra <Return> at the end of each paragraph.
> 
> But when the email appeared on her Mac screen, those extra LFs had been
> stripped out. The paragraphs appeared to have been run together and the
> only clue about the beginning of a new paragraph was the remaining CR at
> the end of the last line.

If it uses Macintosh style newlines, then this would be expected
behavior; UNIX uses LF, Windows uses CR+LF, and classic Macintosh uses
only CR.

> When I hit the <Enter> key on this keyboard, I am assuming it sends both
> CR and LF and another tap on the <Enter> key sends the second LF. Am I
> wrong in that assumption? Is the Mac stripping out the extra LFs? or is
> something else between the KMail editor and my ISP responsible?
> 
> For the record, I use KMail for all routine emails.

UNIX typically uses just LF; however, RFC 822 and RFC 2822 require the
use of CR+LF when transmitting email messages.  It seems that your text
portion looks correct when I view the message source, so I'd check that
on the Mac.

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                       -- Carveth Read, "Logic"