[Mailman-Users] Folding whitespace

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Joseph Brennan writes:

 > Why the tab?

I would suppose because it looks better in character-oriented display.
On most terminals, a tab will expand to 8 spaces, making the fact that
the header is folded very obvious.  It won't hurt anything if you
change it to space.  This isn't going to be a true fix, though,
because IIRC Mailman *does* insert that space, and it will remain as a
doubled space in the recipient's MUA display.

Note that in recent versions of the standard, the handling of FWS has
been clarified: the proper way to unfold is to remove the CRLF, and
change nothing else.  This implies that the proper way to fold is to
find some whitespace and insert a CRLF (and nothing else) before that
whitespace.

Not that it matters, but I think that graphical MUAs are (as usual)
broken here.  They are going to reformat unstructured fields anyway
(treating the single logical line as a paragraph, and wrapping long
ones), so they might as well do the sane thing and interpret all
whitespace as merely a single word separator, then wrap that.  This is
almost never a mistake in my experience.  Not even Pythonistas expect
whitespace to be significant *within* a line! :-)