On Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 7:30 AM Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 11:21:42AM -0700, 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. > [...] > >I understand that there are historical reasons for the 80 character > >limit, but I believe that it is time to reassess best practices. My > >recommendation is that sending email programs should not wrap text at > >an arbitrary column, and that all wrapping of text should be handled by > >the receiving program, which is, of course, the only program that has > >insight into the width of the screen where the email is currently being > >displayed. > > > >I have composed this email without an arbitrary column wrap, so that > >those receiving it can see how it is handled by their various clients > >and devices. > > I found your email difficult to read. I mostly read email in mutt in a > tmux shared with my IRC client, so I normally prefer to keep that window > fully maximized for the benefit of IRC, but email tends to be a bit hard > to read if it actually takes up the full width there. Sender-wrapped or > format=flowed (which mutt renders quite nicely by default these days) > works well for me as a receiver; unwrapped doesn't really.
My two cents, for what it's worth: I had the exact same problem as you when it came to difficulty reading unwrapped text... in the Gmail webmail client. If something is hard to read both with your "dinosaur setup" (as you call it) and my arguably hyper-modern setup, I think it's probably a problem. -- Aaron > This thread did, however, cause me to work out how to configure my > mailer to send format=flowed, since it does look as though that's > somewhat nicer for receivers who aren't using the same kind of dinosaur > setup as I am, and support seems to have improved since the last time I > looked at this eons ago. I needed this in ~/.config/nvim/init.vim > (should also work in ~/.vimrc): > > au FileType mail setlocal formatoptions+=w > > And this in ~/.muttrc: > > set text_flowed > > That seems to work pretty well. I reflowed the parts of your message > that I quoted here to match. > > -- > Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org] >
