Re: Manual line breaks in emails

On 2026-03-25, Philip Webb wrote:

> 260324 Dave Sizer wrote:
>> 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.  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.
>
> I read my e-mails with Most in Mutt on a Konsole on my desktop monitor ;
> Most doesn't do wrapping & if it did, I wouldn't want it to.
> Your unbroken paragraph above is awkward for me to read in that way.
> I want to see lines broken into syntactically meaningful parts as above,
> when I can read them easily + fluently.
>
> If people try to read their correspondence on their cell-phones,
> they're asking for awkward results. Cell-phones are for SMS + chatter (smile).

A thing with GSM terminals capable of running e-mail and other Internet
client software is that perhaps more effort ought to be in having these
clients handle things than in changing the medium or the content to suit
these devices.

Another example is HTML, where the web has, probably since its
inception, been appropriately designed to cater for different devices,
but where Google decided to introduce their own notion of
"mobile-friendly", instead of having their browser handle HTML by
default in the way it was intended to be used.

-- 
Nuno Silva