3 ms·

I like everything about plain text emails except for hard wrapping, which looks awful on screens that are too small or too wide.

• chrismorgan 9y ago
  To a large extent, hard wrapping is a combination of choices made by the sender (to hard wrap the text, because it doesn’t trust clients to soft-wrap properly) and receiver (to soft-wrap or not). There was a standard to handle it nicely, format=flowed; sadly, it didn’t make it: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/17/format-flowed/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/17/format-flowed/ But even without that, the quoted-printable content-transfer-encoding means that the hard wrapping isn’t actually necessary—you can have lines as long as you like. Some email clients do thereby send text/plain with arbitrarily long lines, which will cause overflow in some clients (typically where plain text is shown in a monospace font), and be wrapped in others (most, these days, I think; these are typically where plain text is shown in a proportional font). Then too, some email clients ignore the 78 character limit (it is, after all, only a SHOULD [1]) and write longer lines in the MIME message. (Not sure what they do after 998, which the spec says they MUST not exceed [1].) But the inability to specify the desired semantics of proportional-with-wrapping versus monospace is probably the part of text/plain email that makes me saddest. [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-2.1.1 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-2.1.1