Thanks, David, for the reply, but the issue here is that PMail cuts out text regardless of the reformat/wrap settings. The first line after a long 998-character line gets cut at an apparently arbitrary position, and while the text is all there in raw mode, it will not appear at all in "normal" view mode, however I try to change settings (wrapping, font, printer driver).

To clarify my point, I reproduced the problem by sending myself an E-Mail with three lines: One of scrambled characters, 998 long, and another one consisting of "SECOND LINE", repeated many times. The third and last line just says "How does it appear".

Look:



And here's the raw view:



As you can see, the second line gets cut in normal view!

lazy

Hello!

I recently noticed that some sentences in e-mails were cut off. Today I realized that this is a problem of Pegasus Mail: When I analyze the raw data of the e-mail, all the text is there, but as soon as I switch to "normal" view mode, one paragraph is cut reproducibly at the same position.

This happens regardless of the "wrap long lines" and "reformat long lines" settings, and it occurs with plain text (non-HTML) messages.

When I copy the raw data into another editor, the position at which text is cut seems to vary between e-mails (e.g., after 769 characters in one e-mail and 412 characters in another), and interestingly, it only happens with select lines in the mail. That is, for example, the mail which had a line cut after 769 characters does contain lines that are even longer and get not cut off (but wrap or reformat correctly).

It's PMail version 4.41 on Windows XP SP2 with a Brother HL-2040 printer driver (but it happens with other printer drivers as well).

By the way, I've been using PMail for 10 years now, and it's the most important tool I have on my computer. Beats every other program.

Any help is appreciated

lazy

Is this text on one very long line when seen in raw view?

[quote]When I copy the raw data into another editor, the position at which text is cut seems to vary between e-mails (e.g., after 769 characters in one e-mail and 412 characters in another)[/quote]

Are you saying that text is missing if you view it in other programs?

Thanks for the reply.

The latest e-mail which displays this behaviour has 6 long lines (158, 238, 998, 998, 634, and 580 characters long). The cutting appears only with the second 998-character-long line.

Text is not missing when I view it in other programs. It's only missing when using the Pegasus Mail message reader, and again, it does not depend on the wrapping/reformatting options.

Regards

lazy

[quote user="lazy_leukocyte"]The latest e-mail which displays this behaviour has 6 long lines (158, 238, 998, 998, 634, and 580 characters long). The cutting appears only with the second 998-character-long line.[/quote]

So, out of curiosity, what user-agent is sending mail like this?

998 characters is the "the [SMTP] limit on line length":

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt

(Section 4.1) 

Something like 72 is usual. That's so even if it's got "soft" line breaks and is intended to be unwrapped at the other end.

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: WWW-Mail 6100 (Global Message Exchange)
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Another one:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: WWW-Mail 6100 (Global Message Exchange)
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

So these two were sent via webmail from http://www.gmx.net , a german mail provider (which I use as well, but with POP3/SMTP and PMail).

The second mail had 8 long lines, 215, 331, 386, 997, 730, 201, 166, and 96 characters long. The "730" line gets cut by Pegasus Mail after 412 characters.

I found a third one where a line was cut after only 27 characters. The preceding line had 998 characters as well. This mail was also send from the GMX web interface.

WEB.DE, the other big German mail provider (most of my friends and relatives are from this country...) seems to generally break lines after around 80 characters. From my archives, GMX apparently switched their system from "X-Mailer: WWW-Mail 1.6 (Global Message Exchange)" to "X-Mailer: WWW-Mail 6100 (Global Message Exchange)" in May 2006. With the 1.6 version, they had short lines as well.



Now, interestingly, whenever a line is cut, it is the first line after a 998- or 997-character line. That's striking. If these weren't plain text messages, I would think that some hidden/non-printing characters lead PMail into incorrect assumptions about the line length.

Weird!

lazy

Thanks for satisfying my curiosity.

I did wonder if this was some form of webmail. I just tried sending from the web interface of my GMail account, which I rarely use. It turns out that is wrapping at 72 characters. (Interestingly, the headers say it is sending format=flowed, like Apple Mail/Thunderbird/Opera, but it isn't because it's not space-stuffing.) But at any rate it is wrapping at 72. 

A workaround for the problem is to edit the .CNM files and split problematic lines whenever I realize that text disappears. I've tried it, and it works.

So I wonder if I could automate this process somehow.
I guess for fully automatic line splitting in the source data, I would have to employ something like Mercury, would I.
Or is there a reasonably easy way to produce a PMail extension that does the line splitting business for me?

lazy

[quote user="lazy_leukocyte"]A workaround for the problem is to edit the .CNM files and split problematic lines whenever I realize that text disappears. I've tried it, and it works.[/quote]

Why not just use the program's considerable word wrapping facilities? It has two different ways to reformat messages - Reformatting, where it tries to preserve the assumed appearance of the text, and Wrapping, where it simply wraps lines at a right margin. Reformat is turned on and off by pressing <F5> in the reader, while Wrap is turned on by pressing <Ctrl+F5>. The program remembers whatever reformatting mode you have selected from session to session.

Cheers!

-- David --