Re: POP3 and long lines (Mail::POP3Client)

I think the heuristic in common use is similar to this:

If there are two line endings in a row, it's a new paragraph and they should be kept.
If there's a quoting character at the beginning of a line, the line ending for the previous line should be kept. Quote characters include:
- >
- ::
- name:
- name>
... and any number of nested quote characters after the first without a line ending in between stay part of the same line.
Otherwise, strip the line ending for side-scrolling or soft wrapping (or reformat the lines with a new hard wrap to the maximum length the client sets).

You'd have to do that with the data after you've already retrieved it from the POP3 server. The protocol itself is just a text dump and is not concerned with formatting in any way other than standardized line endings and a blank line between headers and the body.

Comment on Re: POP3 and long lines (Mail::POP3Client)

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Re^2: POP3 and long lines (Mail::POP3Client) by Bassmonger (Initiate) on Nov 19, 2008 at 20:23 UTC
Thanks for the reply. I'll try that tomorrow, though I think I'm still going to struggle given the mails I need to parse are of the form: `Longline1 Longline2 etc` [download] Rather than: `Longline1 Longline2 etc` [download] I'll see how it goes though.	[reply] [d/l] [select]