On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 12:28:29AM -0000, Tavis Ormandy wrote:
Hello, long time mutt user here - I've always hard wrapped my lines at 72 columns for as long as I can remember. The problem is popular modern mobile and web-based MUAs don't handle this and can make unexpected linewrap decisions. It's no issue when emailing UNIX nerds, but non-nerds think I'm doing something wrong. I've seen people convincingly argue it's time to abandon `tw=72` and never wrap lines manually - newlines are for when you want a new paragraph. I've tested, and this does look a lot better on Android for example... but it just feels and looks wrong! What's the general concensus on this issue?
Fixed-length lines of 72 characters don't fit on a phone screen smaller than that. You could break lines at the exact width of a particular recipient's phone screen...(no, I'm not serious).
If you put a newline only at the end of a paragraph, it won't be displayed correctly by software that doesn't expect that. Such software will probably either break each line exactly at the right margin, maybe in the middle of a word, or display a paragraph as a single very long line, maybe with a scroll bar.
The problem is, plain text and paragraph text are two different ways to interpret a sequence of characters, and it's hard for software to know which the sender intended.
One solution would be to invent a new MIME type, say text/paragraph, for text that has a newline only at the end of a paragraph, and so should be automatically filled and word-wrapped to fit the screen. Apparently some such MIME type was considered in the past, but rejected (RFC 3676 mentions it).
Maybe text/plain format=flowed is a solution. It's displayed correctly by software that assumes format=fixed (on a screen that's wide enough), and at any width by software that understands format=flowed. Mutt can display format=flowed correctly at any width, if it's configured to.
Do phone mail readers understand text/plain format=flowed?
