Yes, plain text e-mail in Gmail is awful, absolutely unusable, fact recognised by many people, e.g. the Linux kernel people[1]. However, this article is hilari

Yes, plain text e-mail in Gmail is awful, absolutely unusable, fact recognised by many people, e.g. the Linux kernel people[1]. However, this article is hilariously bad, promotes bad practice concentrating on completely irrelevant issues and offering bad advice. Wrapped text is good, this has been talked to death so I won't repeat it here. Beside being bad style is general, non-wrapped e-mails are very strongly correlated to bad messages. If someone posts non-wrapped e-mails, or worse, HTML on a mailing list it's a very strong cue that person doesn't know what he's talking about, so it's a great way to ignore useless e-mails. Gmail is bad because you can't turn wrapping off. On by default is a great default, it's just awful you can't turn it off when posting code or diffs. Even worse, Gmails started converting tabs to spaces, and eliding leading indentation completely making it absolutely useless as a patch delivery mechanism. The new age auto-reflow stuff also interferes with this. [1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/email-clients.txt https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/email-clients.txt