Scripting: Sending e-mail

I was searching around the Web trying to find some good information on e-mail line length in relation to IERI R3. I much knew that a line length of 78 was the max, but I wanted to find out if there were better guidelines as to the formatting of e-mail. Dan's Mail Format Site has a good article on line length. Something new I learned is that quoted-printable encoding isn't necessarily the best method for avoiding line-length display problems in e-mail clients. quoted-printable is more important from an e-mail transmission point of view by keeping line lengths within the appropriate limits. However, if the e-mail client doesn't reflow the message after removing any soft breaks created by the QP encoding then long lines will still be a problem. the format=flowed Content-Type parameter (which I had been using for the mass mail templates ... though without a full understanding) is more important from a display point of view.

I'll need to do a little more investigation and testing to determine how best to format messages, particularly with regards to client display. While I was looking at this in terms of IERI R3, the information I found will require some modification to the mass mail scripts as well.