Re: Mozilla Mail apparently not wrapping lines at 72 characters

[Barney Wrightson <barney.wrightson@dsto.defence.gov.au>]

Harshwardhan Nagaonkar wrote:

> I have this weird problem with mozilla mail *apparently* not wrapping 
> mail at 72 characters.
>
> I have the setting for wrap at 72 characters at Edit>Preferences>Mail & 
> Newsgroups>Composition .
>
> It appears to work just fine when I am composing emails. All my emails 
> get wrapped when I am typing them out. The problem seems to occur when I 
> send them. I noticed that all my emails in this mailing-list and 
> elsewhere do not seem to wrap at all! Other people's messages nicely 
> wrap and my replies go way off to the left instead of being in a nice 
> readeable column. I wonder why this is happening. I don't want to annoy 
> anyone by this unexplained behaviour. Any comments/insights would be 
> greatly appreciated. I am running Debian Unstable, with Mozilla 1.3.1. 
> Aww, I'll just post that big Mozilla string form Help>About Mozilla -
>
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030527 
> Debian/1.3.1-2
>
> Thanks a bunch everyone,

Mozilla does wrap the text, but it uses the following string in the 
Content-Type header field: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

The format=flowed part allows mozilla to "undo" the wrapping so that 
when you use mozilla to read that mail it fills the width of the screen 
again. So your mail fills the window I use in Mozilla and wraps when it 
hits the edge, but still is wrapped at 72 chars in the quote above. I am 
not sure how it differentiates between an explicit line break and a 
wrapped one though.

I am still not sure if I like it or not, but don't worry about your text 
not being wrapped in other peoples MUAs, I am pretty sure it is.

HTH,
Barney