What are these new Quote bars? Format = Flowed (Macintosh)

Eudora implements what we hope and believe will be a new Internet standard for sending text, format=flowed. This new standard lets you send text marked into paragraphs, which is much more convenient for reading on small or unconventional displays, as well as being easier to handle when quoting, trimming, etc. However, unlike styled text (e.g., enriched or html), format=flowed is not unpleasant for users with simple mailers.

The way format=flowed works is by sending your mail wrapped and with normal quote characters (>'s), just like before. The only difference is that whenever Eudora wraps your text, it adds a single space to the end of the line. This allows Eudora (or other smart mailer) to reconstruct the original text exactly, taking out all the line breaks that were added, and presenting legible mail to the reader, no matter how wide or narrow the window is. A simple mailer won't know how to do this, of course, but that's ok; the only difference will be a single space added on the end of each wrapped line, which will disturb no one.

For a full description of the format=flowed standard, please read RFC 2646.

Along with format=flowed comes increased use of excerpt bars in Eudora. The reason we use excerpt bars with format=flowed text is that the text rewraps itself "on the fly" to your window width, and inserting and removing '>' characters would be very slow and clumsy in such a dynamic environment. When your mail is sent, it is wrapped and the excerpt bars are converted into '>' characters for transmission, so that even if your recipient has a simple mailer, your mail will look fine.

Along with the increased emphasis on excerpt bars comes better tools for dealing with them. If you remember editing around excerpt bars to be painful in earlier versions of Eudora (and I'll be the first to admit you would not have been unjustified), you should be pleasantly surprised at their behavior in Eudora 4. Many bad behaviors have been corrected, and two new commands (quote and unquote, cmd-' and opt-cmd-') have been added to add and remove levels of excerpt. We believe that with these improvements, editing quoted material (whether to trim it or to respond to individual sections) will be much more convenient than it ever could have been using fixed quote characters.

If, for some reason, you do not want to use format flowed and the excerpt bars, you can turn if off by copying and pasting the text below in to Eudora and double-clicking on the following:

<x-eudora-setting:260=1>

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KEYWORDS:: ALLCARDS, EPWIN, EPMAC, FORMAT, FLOWED, EXCERPT, BARS, QUOTE,