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I know about format=flowed. But does that actually solve the problem?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20514314

> The suggestion to use `format=flowed` doesn’t help, as the standard is ill-supported: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/17/format-flowed/ I’ve researched the issue far and wide and the only way to have responsive, nicely wrapped emails is using HTML.

https://cpbotha.net/2016/09/27/thunderbird-support-of-rfc-36...

> Update on 2019-07-16 The current GMail web-ui ignores format=flowed and renders such emails with hard linebreaks everywhere. Thank you Google for violating yet more email standards.

Most people I correspond with where I care about my mail looking "normal" to them seem to use Gmail (about 30-50%), then Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird.



format=flowed does not solve the problem, but you don’t have to resort to HTML. This guy¹ has the right idea: just make each paragraph in your email a single long line (but no more than 998 characters). The idea that we need to break lines at 78 characters, or whatever, is false. Long lines will be wrapped responsively in any sane client, so the reader will have a good experience.

[1]https://www.arp242.net/email-wrapping.html


One of the complaints I've had is that my mail had to be horizontally scrolled to be read.

One long line sounds likely to make the problem for that person worse not better!

That was a while ago though. Clients may have changed.

I'd love to know if someone has put the time into cross-platform tests for this sort of thing.

The only thing I'm completely confident of at the moment is that multipart/mixed text+HTML works for every client.




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