Hi all,
On 2025-02-26 10:21, Soren Stoutner wrote:
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.
I see this too with a lot of ML posts - mails are wrapped in a way such
that the text only takes up a third of my monitor. This is one of those
things where the more I notice it, the more it annoys me :/
However, from a technical perspective, having the *sending* program
decide where line breaks should be in an email doesn’t seem like the
correct approach to me because, 1) the sending program does not know the
screen width of the receiving program, and 2) there is large variability
in the screen width of receiving devices, including cell phones who are
often less than 80 characters wide.
There's plenty of discussion about format=flowed elsewhere in this
thread, but unfortunately it never caught on. This got me thinking
though: why do email clients *have* to show hard-wrapped text as-is? If
I were to write, say, a Thunderbird extension that forcibly unwraps text
I receive, regardless of whether format=flowed was specified, what would
be the implication?
For sake of argument:
- If this re-wrapping is purely client side and happens after PGP
verification, incoming mail could still show as verified (but it may
look slightly different)
- I could toggle this on/off per message, so that I can still write
inline replies based on the original message's formatting
Hacking this in on the client-side won't fix display issues for anyone
else, but it wouldn't break other workflows either.
--
Soren Stoutner
so...@debian.org
Best,
James
