Random bitching about email software

Notice to all email software developers: one of the primary functions of email is to pass around URLs. You may not like it, but it's simply a fact of life. I'd guess that 90% of the email that I send or receive contains some form of URL, even if only in the sig. Therefore, any email client that "helpfully" word wraps URLs at 80 characters (or any other fixed width), when sending or forwarding or doing any other operation on email, is utterly broken. Designing email software with this misfeature is like designing a cell phone that sometimes randomly hangs up the phone when somebody says the word "hello". It's like designing an automobile that sometimes randomly stalls when it's at a red light that changes to green. It is, in short, completely absurd.

I use a mixture of Pine, KMail, and GMail for my email clients, and none of these has ever word-wrapped a URL on my behalf. Bless you, Pine/KMail/GMail developers. However, I still receive a fair amount of email, via mailing lists especially, that contains word wrapped URLs, and I am so freaking pissed at those anonymous software developers, somewhere out there, who are responsible for all the times that I have had to copy and paste bits of these URLs manually into a web browser. Come on! As Stephen Colbert would say, you're on notice.