Re: Manual line breaks in emails

On 2026-03-24, Dave Sizer wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've noticed that there seems to be a trend in the plaintext email
> community where folks will manually insert line breaks in their
> messages seemingly to keep line width readable.

This quite often isn't manual, it's automatic. And isn't limited to
e-mail or netnews, it goes with text documents.

Now in source code, it may be manual in the decision of where to break,
even if indentation might be handled automatically.

> What I don't understand is, this is what line wrapping is for, and
> manually inserting the breaks actually makes the mails look horrible
> on most modern clients that try to do automatic wrapping.

Because long lines are much harder to read and something has to wrap
these lines.

What you say doesn't make much sense, unless you're trying to wrap at a
width significantly smaller than the ones usually seen in the Internet
(and even then, it's probably mathematically possible to pick something
that's about half of 64/72/80 that will alleviate the problem.

> So why do people do it? Is it for readability on the composing side
> because their input editor or terminal doesn't wrap?

Readability on *all* sides.

> I understand the
> aversion to automatic wrapping when it comes to code, but for normal
> language it seems like the standard approach to expect automatic
> wrapping, and only apply line breaks between paragraphs.
>
> Actually - I think I just answered my own question upon realizing that
> the Alpine built-in editor inserts breaks automatically, and my
> preferred external editor, Helix, does not wrap by default. Still, I
> would be interested to hear some opinions and maybe history on this
> from the community.

I think you want to look into format=flowed. Make sure at least that is
enabled on your side, it'll at least give you *something*.

-- 
Nuno Silva