Hi Soren, On Wed Feb 26, 2025 at 7:21 PM CET, Soren Stoutner wrote:
The purpose of this email is to propose that the expectation that emails should be wrapped at 80 characters when they are sent should be dropped.
Most GUI clients handle long lines just fine. Some others, like the aerc TUI client (which I use), don't (by default).
It is worth noting that some people in the past tried to solve this wrapping issue with a proposed standard, [RFC 3676], which defines "Format=Flowed" emails. Such messages requires client capable of composing them, and many do, but some popular ones don't.
In format=flowed messages, lines are hard-wrapped "transparently". Long lines are wrapped with line breaks, but with a trailing space. Receiving clients then consider lines with a trailing space a single logical line, and are free to re-wrap as they prefer. If you receiving client does not support format=flowed, though, you'll just see a message wrapped at 72 cols.
Choosing between sending long lines and flowed text is, to me, a trade-off. Format=flowed requires sender support, but looks good on "dumb" clients. Long lines do not require any special sender support, but looks odd "dumb" clients.
In any case, I feel discussing about RFC 3676 might be a bit off-topic on -devel, so I'll end it here.
I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I received an email from a Debian Developer complaining that replies from my email client (KMail) looked odd because they truncated quoted lines in a way that did not lay out pleasingly. This was because I had set KMail to wrap lines at 80 characters.
(sorry, I didn't mean to haunt your thoughts) Bye! [RFC 3676]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3676
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