With the increasing use of email, more and more messages are appearing in our inboxes looking rather bedraggled from excessive forwarding, poor formatting, or both. Not only does this make the messages hard to read, but it makes it virtually impossible to efficiently cut-and-paste the text for use in another program. And the problem just gets worse as you forward the mail!

==============
Line Breaks: The Root of the Problem
==============
The key to understanding why poorly-formatted email happens is to understand how line breaks are used in email. Back in the old days, before there was multimedia on the Web, all email was just plain text. (A lot of it still is!) An email message contained many separate lines of text, each separated by a "hard return," just as paragraphs in your word processor are separated by a paragraph mark.

Even though you don't type in a "return" at the end of each line, your email program automatically adds these line breaks when it sends your message. This is necessary because many of the systems that process email on the Internet will not handle lines that are longer than about 80 characters. The line length of your email messages can be controlled in your email programs' preferences, and generally defaults to about 72-75 characters.

The second contributing factor to poorly-formatted email is the fact that the Internet has evolved a convention (i.e. an arbitrary standard, or a habit) for marking text that is included from another email with a ">" character at the beginning of each line. Each time a message is responded to or forwarded, another ">" is added, making the line one character longer. Eventually, the lines in the forwarded message are longer than the line length in your email program, and those long lines are split into two when the message is sent, producing messages that look like this:

> See Dick. See Dick run.  Run, Dick, run.  See

Jane

> dance.  Dance, Jane, dance. Spot is a very good

dog.

A third thing that can cause "messy" email is the fact that some older mail programs do not gracefully handle the advanced character sets that let us use "special characters" such as bullet marks, foreign letters, and other non-standard characters. Eudora and many other email programs use something called "quoted-printable" encoding to send these special characters, which requires that the receiving email program support an email standard called MIME. If the email program of your recipient is not "MIME-compliant," then they might see text that looks like this:

>See Dick=20 >See Dick run.  Run, Dick, run.=20

See Jane dance.=20 >Dance,.=20 Jane, dance.=20 

The solution is to turn off "quoted-printable" encoding for messages that are going to people with older mail programs.

In Eudora, there is a button in the compose mail window marked "QP." Usually it's toggled on. Press it to turn it off. It will stay off until you turn it on again.

Outlook and Outlook Express do not use quoted-printable encoding by default. You can make sure it's not on in Outlook at Tools>Options>Mail Format>Settings. The "Encode text as" item lets you choose none, quoted-printable or base64 encoding. In Outlook Express, the same choices can be found at Tools>Options>Send>Plain Text Settings (under Mail Sending Format).

==============
What You Can Do To Prevent Line Breaking
==============
Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent forwarded emails from eventually running over the line limit. While it might seem that turning off automatic line breaking in your email program is a good idea, doing so will result in some people receiving messages that consist of one long line of text.

Another potential solution would be to send "new" messages out with very short line lengths (70 characters, perhaps), which would allow others to forward messages multiple times before they began to break. However, unless you adjusted the line length up to 75-80 for messages you reply to forward, your "non-original" emails will become very messy indeed. Even worse, most email programs don't offer a handy setting for line length; they bury the control deep in the preferences where it's a pain in the rear to change. Dynamically adjusting line lengths is thus not a very viable option.

Newer email programs such as Eudora Pro 4.0, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Netscape 4.0 support HTML-formatted email. HTML-formatted mail doesn't have internal line breaks, and thus is not vulnerable to "spontaneous decomposition," but many people are still using old mail programs such as Eudora Light that simply can't read HTML mail. And a lot of email list programs will scramble HTML-formatted mail. While it's clear that the Internet is moving in the direction of HTML-formatted mail, we're not there yet, and we generally recommend avoiding HTML-formatted mail for widely read messages.

If you set your email to NOT append ">" characters to replies and forwards, it would reduce the chances of the lines breaking unexpectedly. (Unless your email program was set to create shorter lines than the lines in the original message you've received.) But delimiting reply/forward text with the ">" character is important because it helps make it clear which words are yours, and which are someone else's. If you decide to disable reply-marking, then we recommend that you be very clear to explicitly attribute other people's words so they're not mistaken for your own.

==============
The Best Solutions (For Now)
==============
If that's a bit overwhelming, don't worry. There are two easy things you can do to make email formatting much better.

1. Make sure your email program is up to date. Older email programs don't support rapidly-evolving email standards such as rich text formatting, HTML formatting, clickable hyperlinks, etc. See our document on Recommended Internet Software for lists and links to up-to-date email programs.
   
2. There are two easy-to-use programs that will allow you to quickly fix messy email that comes in BEFORE you send it along to others. There are several free or shareware tools that do this quickly and easily.

• For Windows, the best thing we've found is "eCleaner." A free program, it can be found at:
  http://members.tripod.com/schin26/index.htm
  eCleaner also has a plug-in available for Outlook 2000 that will allow to clean-up email messages from within Outlook 2000.
  
• A similar program for the Macintosh is called "Magic Bullets," and it can be found at http://members.aol.com/billKarsh/MacProdPages/MagicBullets.html.

We strongly recommend that you download one of these tools today. They're very simple to use, and will make your email more effective.