[MlMt] format=flowed with long lines?

[froup]

On 7 May 2026, at 10:15, Randall Gellens wrote:

> On 3 May 2026, at 14:00, froup via mailmate wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I recently discovered [this 
>> article](https://vxlabs.com/2019/08/25/format-flowed-with-long-lines/), 
>> which suggests using `format=flowed` with a maximum line length of 
>> 998.
>>
>> Doing this allows clients that support `format=flowed` 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).
>>
>> I’m still using `format=flowed`, and would like to practice this 
>> advice with MailMate. However, I don’t know how to make MailMate 
>> wrap the _raw_ message at 998 characters, or is that even possible. I 
>> tried setting `View > Soft Wrap Column` to 998 but that does not 
>> affect the _raw_ message sent over SMTP.
>>
>> I’d appreciate any help on this.
>
> 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.
>
> --Randall

Hi Randall,

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).

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.

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.

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.”


Best,
Froup
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