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<p dir="auto">On 7 May 2026, at 13:35, froup wrote:</p>
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<p dir="auto">On 7 May 2026, at 10:15, Randall Gellens wrote:</p>
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<p dir="auto">On 3 May 2026, at 14:00, froup via mailmate wrote:</p>
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<p dir="auto">Hi,</p>
<p dir="auto">I recently discovered <a href="https://vxlabs.com/2019/08/25/format-flowed-with-long-lines/" style="color: #BBBBBB;">this article</a>, which suggests using <code style="margin: 0 0; padding: 0 0.25em; border-radius: 3px; background-color: #F7F7F7;">format=flowed</code> with a maximum line length of 998.</p>
<p dir="auto">Doing this allows clients that support <code style="margin: 0 0; padding: 0 0.25em; border-radius: 3px; background-color: #F7F7F7;">format=flowed</code> to reflow the long lines while also making bad clients such as Outlook to dynamically wrap the whole long line at frame boundary to avoid them interpreting soft line breaks as hard line breaks (since there won’t be any soft or hard line breaks unless your paragraph is longer than 998 characters).</p>
<p dir="auto">I’m still using <code style="margin: 0 0; padding: 0 0.25em; border-radius: 3px; background-color: #F7F7F7;">format=flowed</code>, and would like to practice this advice with MailMate. However, I don’t know how to make MailMate wrap the <em>raw</em> message at 998 characters, or is that even possible. I tried setting <code style="margin: 0 0; padding: 0 0.25em; border-radius: 3px; background-color: #F7F7F7;">View > Soft Wrap Column</code> to 998 but that does not affect the <em>raw</em> message sent over SMTP.</p>
<p dir="auto">I’d appreciate any help on this.</p>
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<p dir="auto">The idea of Format=Flowed is that, by soft-wrapping messages at below 80 characters, the message can be treated as non-F=F by clients that don't understand F=F.</p>
<p dir="auto">--Randall</p>
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<p dir="auto">Hi Randall,</p>
<p dir="auto">Yes, that is exactly the problem. For example, Outlook would interpret these soft wraps as hard wraps and causes lines to break at, say, 80 characters, which looks very poor (especially on mobile devices).</p>
<p dir="auto">What I want is to insert soft wraps only when line length exceeds SMTP limit (998 characters), so a not-so-long paragraph (like this one) appears as a whole line in the raw message. Since there is no line breaks anymore in these paragraphs, even a bad client like Outlook can just break lines at the frame boundary dynamically like how it treats non f=f messages, leading to a more natural looking.</p>
<p dir="auto">Meanwhile, a decent client such as MailMate capable of handling f=f can just reflow the lines according to user’s preference, since the message is still f=f. For instance, maybe someone using a terminal mail client want to always wrap lines at 80 characters, and their f=f capable client can reflow my message like that even if the raw message contains only very long lines.</p>
<p dir="auto">In short, people using decent clients see my message as good as always, while people using Outlook don’t ask me again “why your email looks weird?” Citing from the article I cited in the beginning: “your plaintext email will be reflowed by a much larger group of recipients and therefore appear substantially less terrible on their displays.”</p>
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<p dir="auto">The Format=Flowed RFCs discuss the issue of mobile devices and small screens; it's one of the main reasons for F=F. I suppose soft-breaking at 998 is a lot less bad in today's world than back when F=F was created. I don't know if MailMate has a hidden preference for where to soft-wrap F=F. I added Benny to the Bcc list.</p>
<p dir="auto">--Randall</p>
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