I disagree, because it's (far) easier to soft-wrap QP long lines than it is to unwrap hard-wrapped short lines. Hard-wrapping essentially causes a loss of infor

I disagree, because it's (far) easier to soft-wrap QP long lines than it is to unwrap hard-wrapped short lines. Hard-wrapping essentially causes a loss of information, by not distinguishing between user-inserted and program-inserted newlines. Any client program can wrap as appropriate (which is not always to 80 chars, but 80 chars would work as well as anything) with QP; the same is not true of hard-wrapped as gmail does it.