On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 08:28:25AM +0100, Thomas Davie wrote:
Anyway, my basic point is that an email client that will not soft-wrap lines is fundamentally broken.
AFAIK the relevant RFCs state that email should *not* have unwapped lines. Which means that a mail client that doesn't soft-wrap is not broken but standard-conforming.
Emails can and do have lines longer than 80 characters, and a client that can't render them has a serious bug.
I disagree. There is a clear standard for dealing with different line lengths. It's called 'format=flowed' and basically states that lines should be wrapped and end in space+newline. Email thus formatted can be reformatted by the client.
If your client is one of these, I suggest you either (a) move to a less buggy client, or (b) write a patch to fix the bug. The correct solution though is not to enforce upon everyone else that they must write emails with a particular line length.
format=flowed does exactly that: not force upon everyone to write emails with a particular line length. See RFC 2646. IMHO email clients that send long lines instead of using format=flowed are buggy. -- Joost Kremers Life has its moments