On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 11:49:05AM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote: > I was just interested to see if I was missing a good reason why an MUA
> would _want_ to mangle its input rather than displaying what was
> actually sent.
When a user replies to a mail, the client usually prefixes the subject
with "Re: ". That increases the line length and may require introducing
a new fold. Since some clients display folding line breaks, you should
put MIME words before and after the newly introduced fold to get rid of
the added line break or you would get:
Subject: Re:
old subject, that filled the line up to 78 characters
Perhaps the subject wasn't MIME encoded before, thus causing the need
to re-fold the old subject, too.
Various clients just unfold and MIME-decode the line, add "Re: ", and
MIME-encode and fold it again, which is much easier.
Line breaks from folding have no semantic meaning, but that was never
a point of discussion. ;-)
