The email is space-stuffed meaning it was probably written with format=flowed[1] (you can tell because there are spaces appended to hard-wrapped lines). That RF

The email is space-stuffed meaning it was probably written with format=flowed[1] (you can tell because there are spaces appended to hard-wrapped lines). That RFC was invented precisely for the purpose you mention: hard wrap lines in "dump" plain text clients, but allow "intelligent" clients to soft-wrap according to their own display width. This email would display at full-width in a client that respects format=flowed (many modern email readers, except for, notably, Outlook and Gmail). But as others have pointed out, this is literally just the plain text of the email wrapped in a <pre> tag, so you get the hard line breaks. [1]: https://joeclark.org/ffaq.html https://joeclark.org/ffaq.html