It is not they, nor others who are also following RFC3676, who need to fix their implementation: it isn’t broken.

The standard format=flowed, as described in RFC2646, exists so that text can be easily re-flowed whatever the size of the display. It was originally a suggestion made by the Eudora people–and that’s not surprising since Qualcomm had a hand in cellphones:

http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html

There is a reason for the change, that RFC376 brings, too:

“The newer technique, suitable for use even with languages/coded character sets in which the ASCII space character is rare or not used, creates a soft line break by inserting a SP CRLF sequence. When this technique is used, the DelSp parameter MUST be used and MUST be set to “yes”.”

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt

Apple and Opera seem to have no problems doing as suggested.

Neither does Mulberry:

http://trac.mulberrymail.com/mulberry/ticket/5

KDE’s Kontact has it marked as a bug to fix:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92591

What are software developers to say? “Hard luck if your language is one in which in which ‘the ASCII space character is rare or not used’, because we’re going to ignore the means that have been devised specifically to help you.”?

In fact I’m jack of the fact that URLs break so much all time time in all mail clients. Why is that Microsoft can take six years to create a new version of Windows and totally redesign the user interface of Office 2007 and STILL NOT BE ABLE TO HANDLE BROKEN URLS ELEGANTLY!?

How can we put man on the moon, hook up massive computing grids and create Pixar movies, and yet still not be able to solve one of the most basic problems in computing: broken URLs in emails? It’s BLOODY ANNOYING!

That’s not true. Cyrus Daboo has fixed Mulberry Mail so that it now follows the standards. Opera Mail certainly does as well. So credit where it’s due. It’s possible that others do, too, but I don’t know the capabilities of everything out there.

Of course, if we are waiting on *Microsoft* to fix its software, we may be in for a very long wait. IE is a case in point. It can now–finally–deal with alpha-transparency in PNGs, and how long has that taken? But its CSS-handling, and much else besides, is still *years* out-of-date.

The Delsp option used by Mail is in the RFC, so Apple is following the standard. The problem is that no one else is.

This raises an interesting philosophical question about the nature of RFCs (should they codify what everyone does or what everyone should do?) but doesn’t help Mail users out of their predicament.