ALL: Please format to 70 positions or less.

I have been seeing an increasing proportion of messages which seem to
have been created in editors with moderately long linelengths, from
close to 80 up to a hundred or so. And I don't like it.

One thing is that the lines get broken into alternating long and short
fragments in my viewer. While this does break up the visual shape of
the text, making it more difficult to read and harder to see where new
paragraphs begin, I can just resize the window to make the lines fit.

Much worse is the effect when the message is quoted by someone whose
user agent enforces a shorter line length. Now the added linebreaks
are part of the text, and won't go away. Sometimes even an author's
own text is mangled in this way before his system sends it!

So --- please, please compose your messages with automatic hard
linebreaks set to 70 positions, but only for new text. That leaves
room for a few levels of quoting before various other parts of the
mail systems begin to mangle included text.

Feeling grumpy,
Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)