Plain text email format.

[Dan Edgerton]

I have read the preferences of many contributors on this list for plain text
formatting of email messages. I find their thoughts on the subject to be
reasonable and logical.

However, when I send out email formatted as plain text often when I receive
a reply the message I sent originally shown posted back in the reply has
sentence breaks in odd places and doesn't flow to the eye with a natural
style. This must have to do with how line breaks are being added somewhere
in the process. Using the rewrap text function will often correct this but
this too seems to add some odd characteristics at times. I don't seem to see
these issues when using HTML formatting.

My question is this the normal behavior for email formatted as text to have
unusual line flow or is there some settings I need to adjust to have more
normal appearance to the text.

Thanks

 

[Rob Schneider]

It's really nothing to do with you and is normal.

The email program used by the person sending you mail has included your
text, added some spaces or something as a prefix on each line (to mark
it as replied text), which then causes it to spill over past the line
size break. With HTML formatting the formatting is "respected" since
it's a more-sophisticated "engine" to flow text on the screen.

You really can't control the format of email sent to you. It's only a
coincidence that the mail includes text originally from you.

--rms

 

[Michel Bintener]

Hi Dan,

Rob's answer is quite correct: Entourage inserts hard line breaks after 72
characters, and if the text is quoted by an email program that behaves in
the same way, the lines break differently because the quote characters "> "
change the length of each line.

That being said, there's a more modern standard called "format=flowed" which
prevents these ugly hard line breaks, but unfortunately, this format is not
supported by Entourage. You can find it in Mail and Thunderbird, for
instance. See here for more details: <http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html>

If you want f=f supported in a future version of Entourage, click on
Help>Send Feedback about Entourage and write a feature request.