>> Why not? Is your email client incapable of wrapping text? > Well, paragraph/lines is the way most email clients function > nowadays.
Windows is the way most computers function nowadays. Shall we therefore reject any suggestion that Windows is not the way everyone should work? :-) (My point is that popularity, in itself, should not be taken as a recommendation.) > Maybe there's a setting in Thunderbird that wraps the lines on > writing a new email, I should certainly hope so; if not, I would call it broken and most certainly would say it should not be used (at least not for arm's-length email; for email between mutually consenting parties with prearrangement, anything agreeable to all parties goes). Or unless the user is willing to manually insert suitable line breaks, I suppose; personally, I maintain that the software should adapt to the human, not the other way around, in such cases. > but most clients are perfectly happy to wrap incoming mail to fit the > windows/screen size. Perhaps, but (a) not everyone reads mail with "client"s (my MUA, for example, is not a client in any meaningful sense) and (b) we're back to popularity being used as a touchstone of goodness, as if anything that's popular is necessarily acceptable. > But I'll be happy to comply to the wishes for preformatted text; just > tell me how. I'd say, for running text, wrap somewhere before 80 characters per line (preferably before about 78, since some programs lose a column or two on display - personally, I wrap at column 72). I'm sure others will differ in various details, but I suspect most will probably be somewhere close to that. Of course, if you have something where line breaks have semantic relevance, such as output from a build script, leave the breaks where they belong unless you have some _really_ long lines (1000 chars or thereabouts, I think, is the SMTP maximum), in which case you can either go ahead and break them manually (preferably with a warning in accompanying text), encode the output with base64 or btoa or uuencode or some such, put the output up for fetching somewhere and just provide a link to it, etc. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
