On 18 Nov 2013, at 11:54, Sherif Soliman wrote:
Hello everyone, I'm a new user and I'm trying to set up MailMate to be
my permanent mail client, so apologies if this is answered somewhere
else. I tried searching and came up with nothing.
Is there a way to stop MailMate from hard wrapping plain text replies
and quoted blocks to 72/73 characters? I've always strongly disliked
that and I really, really need to stop that from happening. It is
almost a deal-breaker for me, so I really hope there is some way to
turn that off. Judging from the number of emails I've received from
the MM mailing list, I'm hopeful there is a way.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
I don't know exactly what you're looking for or whether MM can be made
to do it, but this is probably related to the fact that MM uses the
"format=flowed" version of text/plain messages as defined by RFC3676
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt) (which is derived from the earlier
definition in RFC2646)
The issues that led to the definition of format=flowed are discussed in
detail in RFC3676 and RFC2646. In "raw" form, a format=flowed message
has lines of 79 or fewer characters, preserving backwards compatibility
with old and/or MIME-ignorant tools that expect email to suit the
traditional 80-column terminal format. However, the use of format=flowed
in the MIME Content-Type header for a message tells any reasonably
modern MIME-aware mail client that those apparently "hard wrapped" lines
follow the RFC3676 rules that make it possible for the client to reflow
the text (including quoted text) to fit its own presentation needs.
The alternative approach used in some mail clients of using a single
logical line per paragraph (with Base64 or Quoted-Printable encoding
used to protect that format in transit) has a long history of
dysfunction and is compatible across mail tools based primarily on their
ability to copy and/or interpret each other's quirks. There is no formal
specification of how clients should reflow decoded text with very long
lines to fit or overflow a rendering window, and by strict
interpretation of past and current standards (i.e. what RFC3676
describes as "format=fixed") a client shouldn't engage in "soft
wrapping" of long lines. One result of clients using the misguided
line-per-paragraph format can be seen in many web-accessible archives of
mailing lists with many users of those broken mail clients: the text of
their messages runs off the right side and you have to scroll over to
read it all. The saddest examples of this are at lists.apple.com,
because Apple made the spectacularly stupid choice a few years ago to
switch Mail.app from generating format=flowed messages to mimicking
older versions of Outlook. Ironically, MS almost simultaneously added
RFC3676 support to Outlook, leaving Mail.app the unchallenged champion
of non-standard mail formatting among current clients.
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