Re: Re: Manual line breaks in emails

On 3/29/26 3:36 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> That's assuming there's a window with width, which isn't necessarily 
> the case.

There is always a window or viewable area.

> When I read format=flowed mail on alpine (aka pine) over ssh, it 
> doesn't get wrapped at all; it is displayed on lines 240 characters 
> long, the width of the console.

Your ""window (viewable area) sounds like it's 240 characters wide.

> This is not comfortable to read.
That discomfort doesn't surprise me.

A console of 240 characters wide does surprise me.

> Mail with linebreaks every 70-80 characters is somewhat easier to 
> read for me.  I don't believe alpine can be configured to behave 
> better with format=flowed.

I have no idea what sort of console you are using that is 240 characters 
wide.

I'd suggest exploring ways to change that.

Or if you want to not see a logical line that's the full width of the 
viewable area (window), see about causing Alpine to not display messages 
with format=flowed.

Though I would encourage you to sending with format=flowed.

> Yuck!  That's a horrible thing to have to do.  Why should a message's 
> line width have anything to do with the window width?

That's what format=flowed does, display the lines as wide as the area to 
display them in.

> mutt behaves better than alpine when displaying format=flowed messages, 
> breaking lines at around 70 or 80 characters.  I think there's a 
> configuration variable for this.

That doesn't surprise me.

> As a matter of interest, what about when a paragraph is longer than 
> 750 characters (which isn't all that long)?

I chose 750 characters somewhat arbitrarily way longer than the 70-80 
character of some terminals and still considerably shorter than the RFC 
defined maximum physical line.

The logical line of a paragraph is effectively unlimited.  The physical 
line(s) that make up that logical line MUST be no more than 998 
characters to leave room for the <CR> and <LF> which SMTP requires.

So have a logical line as long as you want made up of physical lines 
that won't cause people to yell at you.

> Such forced window resizing must surely be irksome.  It would be for 
> me, if I read mail on a GUI system.

I've always chosen the size of my windows based on the area that I want 
them in.  Having the test flow to whatever size the window was has 
always been much nicer than needing to scroll side to side.

> That's also one of the nasty things about format=flowed, depending 
> on your point of view.

Sounds to me like you should cause your email client to not display 
messages using format=flowed.

Thankfully the only thing special about format=flowed is a space at the 
end of physical lines that are supposed to be merged with the next line. 
  So that space will almost certainly not bother you if you disable 
format=flowed display of messages and instead look at the physical lines.



-- 
Grant. . . .