Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

Try looking in the Help files for information on the format=flowed
header line which appears in your post. That may have something to do
with it. Or check other variants of "flow" in the Help file index.
--
franzi

I too was annoyed by the damage done in my postings. I can't recall now
who gave me this advice, but it appears to have worked.

(The instructions here are for Thunderbird 3.0. Version 2.0.0.14 is
actually superior to 3.0, but I haven't yet gotten around to reverting
to that version. Configuration options have been shuffled around between
versions, so the desired option won't necessarily be in the place I
describe below.)

Choose Tools/Options, and then go to the "Advanced" section. This has
several subsections. Select the one called "General". (That is, the
"General" within "Advanced", not the "General" within "General".) You
should now see a button labelled "Config editor". Click on it. If you
didn't find that button, search through all of Thunderbird's options
until you find something pointing to the configuration editor.

At this point version 3.0 gives a warning about voiding your warranty.
Ignore the warning, and proceed. Thunderbird comes without a warranty -
not like the commercial products, whose warranty states that nothing is
guaranteed to work and anything that goes wrong won't be fixed - so
someone was being frivolous.

In the "Filter" box, type "flowed". This should bring up two option
settings whose names contain the string "flowed". The second one is the
interesting one. Right-click the item called
"mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed", and choose "Toggle" from the popup
menu. That should change the value of that option to "false".

You can now close the various configuration windows, and the problem
should be solved. You won't see any immediate effect; you'll have to
wait until someone quotes you to see whether it worked.

What is going on here is that the MIME headers on a newsgroup article
may optionally include the specification "format=flowed". Or, as many
people have labelled this stupid option, "format=flawed".  It specifies,
in effect, that line breaks should not be treated as hard line breaks,
so that any newsreader reading that article is free to re-wrap the
lines. This is possibly a useful feature for e-mail, but should never be
used if you want to preserve deliberately inserted line breaks. This
"feature" should not, in my opinion, have been allowed into the MIME
standard, because it was badly thought out. People who /do/ want soft
line breaks probably don't want them everywhere; there are frequently
places where a line break /must/ be interpreted as a hard line break.
The "format=flawed" option does not allow for this possibility.

One of the nasty consequences of Thunderbird's using it by default is
that the problem does not make itself visible at the sending end. Rey,
James would have seen neatly formatted lines in what he sent to the
newsgroup. A mess does not occur until the article is read by some other
newsreader that understands "format=flowed" (even if it does not
generate such headers itself). By that stage the trail has already been
muddied, such that it's hard to work out where the damage was done. It
certainly took me a while to realise that my own postings were flawed in
this way. I didn't see anything wrong with my articles as such; the
damage didn't appear until someone else quoted me.