[bshimmin]

From the link: "The lone dot that ends a format can also prematurely end a mail message passing through a misconfigured Internet mailer (and based on experience, such misconfiguration is the rule, not the exception). So when sending format code through mail, you should indent it so that the format-ending dot is not on the left margin; this will prevent SMTP cutoff."

If you're of a certain age and read that and grimace as you immediately understand why this would happen, it does rather put into perspective the misery of dealing with, say, Webpack configuration.

[u801e]

> From the link: "The lone dot that ends a format can also prematurely end a mail message passing through a misconfigured Internet mailer (and based on experience, such misconfiguration is the rule, not the exception). So when sending format code through mail, you should indent it so that the format-ending dot is not on the left margin; this will prevent SMTP cutoff."

Did email clients not handle "dot stuffing" back then? That is, if a line begins with a single dot, the client would automatically insert another dot right before it. Then, at the receiving end, the client would remove the extra dot at the beginning of the line.