UNIX mail and wrapping

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Greetings,

I am by no means a Unix expert and hope that someone here can help me out.

I am sending an email from within a Progress character program. This works fine.
My issue is that I would like to send more than 80 characters and the email is wrapping at 80 chars.

Is this an email issue? Or can I send a param on the mail command to allow for more characters?

Here is my Progress command:

 unix silent "mail -s 'Subject' user@company.com < " value(t-efilename).

The text file represented by t-efilename is 100 characters wide. The email when received wraps everything after 80 chars onto the next line.

Here is the body of the email:

                          PO DUE DATE CHANGE ALERT
   
  Item   :  105562
   
  Width  :     21.250
  Length :  43500.000
   
  Original Due Date :  01/15/13
  New Due Date      :  01/12/13
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  -------------
   
       Job  Scheduled Date/Time      Customer                   Qty
  Ordered   Remaining
   -------  -----------------------  -------------------------
  -----------  ----------
    785324  02/12/2013 07:31:08.000  GC Company
  1,500.00  192,708.33

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

RA

2

Can you double check if your email client is wrapping texts after 80 chars?

I'm not familiar with progress character program, another option is to convert your file into HTML and specify the line breaks <br> thus avoiding the wrapping issue.

3

Thanks for the reply.

HTML is an option for sure.

As for the wrapping, the crappy thing is that I am not whitelisted on my clients site (yet) so I cannot use my email address to test the output. I am having the email forwarded to me.......

Very inefficient and time consuming but it's all I have right now. I will ask about the wrapping in email.

4

If you have access to the unix command line can you try an mail the file without going through progress eg:

$ mail -s 'Subject' user@company.com < /tmp/your_mail_file

This way we can rule out anything related to the progress character client.

5

Ran it from the command line. Waiting to hear from my client as to how it looks.

More later.....

---------- Post updated at 03:22 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:21 PM ----------

Looks exactly the same.

6

Alright. So your client's email application is the culprit, not your progress code. I guess now they should figure out what settings need to be changed to avoid this wrapping.

OR convert your file to HTML as suggested earlier.

7

As bipinajith said earlier there is a very good chance it's the email client wrapping the text.

Wonder if they are using a unix character mail viewer like mutt or pine.

8

He is using Outlook for mail client.

9

Outlook seems to have sometimes issues with wrapping plain text messages after certain number of characters.

It looks like there is some settings that can be changed to get it resolved. I suggest you to search Microsoft forums or Outlook help for any instructions.

10

He is using Outlook 2010.

When he changes his default font to Courier New - 10 it looks great and comes in properly. The problem with this however is that all of his email is now in Courier New - 10.

So, I googled "can i specify a font in outlook 2010 for a specific email address" and found a link that explained how to do it.

http://tinyurl.com/ch8ds6v

He will set this up and I think all will be well.

Thanks for your time and thoughts.

RA