apple mail adds \n about every 72 characters or so - how do I strip these and preserve actual \n

Question

Looking at the raw, generated email generated from AppleMail, it doesn't appear that I can tell the difference between the \n characters generated by the application, and \n characters created by the user. The ones generated by the program do not have a consistent occurrence but it seems that it's in the range of 70-73. I would like to strip these out and save the ones by the user.

Have any of you had a similar problem?

Answer 1

It looks to me like the soft breaks are all preceded by a space character, while the hard breaks are all not.

When I try to compose a message that has a space right before a hard break, Mail strips the space on send.

Answer 2

You may want to read up on the "flowed" content format, which you seem to be observing here. You need to be MIME-aware to handle this situation properly. Here's an excerpt:

--Apple-Mail-103--514089007
Content-Type: text/plain;
    charset=US-ASCII;
    format=flowed;
    delsp=yes

Please see RFC 2646.