Re: Re: Manual line breaks in emails

On 3/25/26 6:19 AM, Anna Vyalkova wrote:
> There's a secret third thing - "text/plain; format=flowed". Clients 
> that support it will reflow the text while other clients will display 
> it wrapped at 72 (or whatever you prefer) columns.

I too am a HUGE fan of format=flowed emails.  I've been going out of my 
way to use format=flowed emails for years.  So much so that I've got 
scripts to re-wrap text to support format=flowed.

Quick refresher on what format=flowed is for those that might not know:

format=flowed is a way of sending text email with physical lines at a 
specified character width / count; nominally 72-78, as specified by the 
sender.

format=flowed adds a space at the end of physical lines that are to be 
continued / unwrapped into a logical line by the receiver.

This means that receivers which support & enable format=flowed unwrap 
the logical line for display at whatever width the receiver's window is 
at while still appearing as traditional fixed width text to receivers 
that don't support or disable format=flowed.

format=flowed really is the closest to the best of both worlds.

A "physical line" is the line of text in the message body as viewed in 
the message source.

A "logical line" is one or more physical lines unwrapped to construct 
the aggregate line.

format=flowed works very easily by putting a character at the end of a 
physical line to indicate that is part of a longer logical line.  That 
character is a space.  Yep, " " (character 32 decimal / 20 hexadecimal / 
%20 URL code).

This means that physical lines in format=flowed emails are backwards 
compatible with clients that don't use it and look just like traditional 
hard wrapped plain text emails.  While clients that do use format=flowed 
see a logical line wrapped at whatever width window the reader is using.

> My emails are formatted this way.

The message that I'm replying to wasn't format=flowed.



-- 
Grant. . . .