Re: Email line length

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 11:30:20AM +1000, [email protected] wrote:
>    I'm seeing more and more emails
>    that have incredibly long lines.

I'm confused. You mean a single LF-terminated line is used for the whole paragraph? Like this (112 characters)?

>    I can of course word-wrap, but that breaks quoting,

I'm using mutt, and the lines wrap around on the terminal but when I quote them there's only a single '> ' used, which is quite alright. I usually follow the sender's style and so if I'm quoting a substantial chunk of text from a single line then I need only one '> ' anyway.

>    I'm assuming this is a Windows and Mac thing.  Is there any setting
>    I can get the senders to tweak that will label emails as
>    `format=flowed'? 

Asking senders to change the way they email is usually fruitless.

I find it's generally more of a problem for Windows users receiving my email,
where I put in the line breaks myself (such as this paragraph). Their mail
clients automatically flow the lines together to fit their terminal width,
which may not be what I want if I'm pre-formatting the text, such as a
list:

  - a
  - b
  - c

I'm told their clients turn off auto flowing if a line starts with at least 3
spaces, so to prevent them seeing "-a -b -c" I will do this:

   - a
   - b
   - c

Or even this:

  - a

  - b

  - c

Given the wide variety of ways mail clients display and create email messages,
desired formatting could be preserved by marking up the message with HTML, but
on the other hand HTML email as it's usually used is extremely evil and forget
I even mentioned it.

Nick.
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