Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / March 2007

Oh yes it is :)

The use of line-breaks to create a "wrapping" effect is the primary cause
of all the badly laid out quoted text, or at least used to be because it is
fortunately increasingly a thing of the past in emails.

In addition the insertion of line-breaks can make searching for a couple of
words in an email more difficult. If you are searching for the expression
"hi and howdy doody" in an email which has had line-breaks put in then the
chances are quite high that a line-break will have appeared between the
words in the phrase.

There are many very good reasons for not putting line-breaks in emails.

Now to this next point:

Well this is not a bug. Very few people read emails with fixed width fonts
these days so laying out text on the basis that they will have their email
program set with a fixed width font is not very sensible.

Plain text emails don't support things like outdented paragraphs and trying
to recreate that effect by using line-breaks is crude and will simply break
down in many cases.

Anyway all these issues regarding the pointless insertion of line-breaks in
emails have been discussed often enough over the years and so I won't be
engaging in this one any further.

You're going to have to get a new e-mail program, then.  Precision
text handling for power users is not one of Mail.app's strong points.
Thunderbird is a decent choice, at least for composition.  Mailsmith
is excellent in this regard, but it's a bit out of date, as it was
built with more pre-Mac OS X methods in mind.  I still use it sometimes,
however.

If you compose the message in plain text and your lines don't exceed 72
characters, Mail.app should leave them alone.

Is it a bug when your recipient simply ignores all formatting, converts
to plaintext and forces flowed-format?  Many MUAs do this as a matter of
course.

Whether or not you agree with the various RFCs that define what an email
message looks like (with or without the addition of MIME information)
you have very little control over how your email looks on the receiving
side.

I wouldn't invest /too/ much in worrying about how a message looks to
you when you compose it.  By the time it gets where you send it, all
bets are off.

My advice is to ensure your messages convey information clearly and
worry less about the presentation.

To answer your original query, you can control how a message looks to
you when composing it if you choose rich text or HTML as the format.
You can guarantee the receiving MUA will get the formatting right (or at
all), but it will sure look nice at your end.