Plain text email - To wrap or not wrap?
I found Drew DeVault's guide on plain text email a while ago but I was never convinced on the "Wrapping your text" recommendation. Why force a width limit
on readers
of your email that will end up looking like this if they, by any
chance, have
an even smaller window or bigger font?
Why not leave it to the viewer software?
https://useplaintext.email/#etiquette
2024-09-06 · 2 years ago · 👍 BBSman, tenno-seremel, random-elephant, deafpolygon
7 Comments ↓
🦀 AlbertLarsan68 · 2024-09-06 at 20:09:
There exists the format=flowed MIME parameter, that allows hard-wrapped text to be re-flowed by the User-Agent.
🚀 mbays · 2024-09-06 at 20:50:
yes, f=f is the solution, even if in practice most people will mess it up when replying.
🎵 random-elephant · 2024-09-06 at 22:12:
Allowing clients to decide how text should wrap, or not, makes sense to me.
💀 requiem · 2024-09-07 at 09:46:
Yeah, hardwraps are not ideal, especially in this strange age when eg. you might be using a smartphone to ssh into your home server and use `neomutt` or whatever to read your e-mails…
My phone, for example, can roughly display 60 chars in a row. Usually you wrap plaintext emails at 80 chars - the default terminal width. You can see how inconvenient this can get.
Letting clients wrap text is a great kindness.
🛰️ lufte [OP] · 2024-09-09 at 23:05:
That is one long RFC to address something that looks simple at first sight. I guess nothing is really that simple when you dig deep enough. Too bad that it requires a sort of agreement between the parties, the sender must include the parameter and the recipient has to support it.
🌧️ deafpolygon · 2025-08-09 at 10:42:
there was a time when client viewers weren't really capable of wrapping, and a hard wrap was necessary. this is no longer true, and we shouldn't hard-wrap by practice anymore. let the client reflow the text as needed.
🐦 JustASillyBird · Apr 11 at 12:14:
Deafpolygon is right: Wrapping text in email was always a work-around for the crude technology of the time. This is no longer an issue.
To give some idea: Why is it tradition to wrap lines at 80 columns? Because that is how wide the old teletype terminals allowed. And why did they wrap at 80? Because 80 columns is also the width of an IBM punched card.