Wirt Atmar wrote:

>>I need to send a plain text email which contains data which is columnar in
>> nature. In order to preserve the columns I would like to ensure that the
>> message is read using fixed pitch font. What can I put in the email headers
>> to specify a fixed pitch font (e.g. Courier)

> I'm reasonably certain that no such mechanism exists. The character set and
> encoding mechanism can be specified in the relevant RFCs, but not the font.

If we are talking about the original specifications, i.e. RFC822, then
the standard specification only includes 7-bit ASCII.  The underlying
syntax of a mail message has the following basic elements:

           The following rules are used to define an underlying lexical
      analyzer,  which  feeds  tokens to higher level parsers.  See the
      ANSI references, in the Bibliography.

                                                  ; (  Octal, Decimal.)
      CHAR        =  <any ASCII character>        ; (  0-177,  0.-127.)
      ALPHA       =  <any ASCII alphabetic character>
                                                  ; (101-132, 65.- 90.)
                                                  ; (141-172, 97.-122.)
      DIGIT       =  <any ASCII decimal digit>    ; ( 60- 71, 48.- 57.)
      CTL         =  <any ASCII control           ; (  0- 37,  0.- 31.)
                      character and DEL>          ; (    177,     127.)
      CR          =  <ASCII CR, carriage return>  ; (     15,      13.)
      LF          =  <ASCII LF, linefeed>         ; (     12,      10.)
      SPACE       =  <ASCII SP, space>            ; (     40,      32.)
      HTAB        =  <ASCII HT, horizontal-tab>   ; (     11,       9.)
      <">         =  <ASCII quote mark>           ; (     42,      34.)
      CRLF        =  CR LF

      LWSP-char   =  SPACE / HTAB                 ; semantics = SPACE

      linear-white-space =  1*([CRLF] LWSP-char)  ; semantics = SPACE
                                                  ; CRLF => folding

      specials    =  "(" / ")" / "<" / ">" / "@"  ; Must be in quoted-
                  /  "," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <">  ;  string, to use
                  /  "." / "[" / "]"              ;  within a word.

      delimiters  =  specials / linear-white-space / comment

      text        =  <any CHAR, including bare    ; => atoms, specials,
                      CR & bare LF, but NOT       ;  comments and
                      including CRLF>             ;  quoted-strings are
                                                  ;  NOT recognized.

      atom        =  1*<any CHAR except specials, SPACE and CTLs>

Only in recent times do we allow for 8-bit characters or, heaven help
us, 16-bit character sets.  For the former, most mailers will now allow
you to pass 8-bit characters "as is", or make them "quoted-printable",
but anything more exotic is generally MIME-encoded (into a 6-bit subset
of 7-bit ASCII).

The thought of a "font" is perverse, as is "fixed/proportional" :-)
and applies only between mutually consenting mail user agents, with
special emphasis on "mutually consenting".  Remember that next time you
get an HTML message in a Chinese character set.

The underlying transport agents of the vast majority of the internet
still deal in 7-bit ASCII, despite the filth you encode into it.

Jeff

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