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I prefer reading and writing emails in plain text. My emails are presented and composed in 80-character fixed-width-font windows, and I love text messages that are properly quoted (with “>”) and marked up with ASCII. Like in the olden days…

However, I acknowledge that the world has moved on, and many people now read email on tiny or large screens that require text flowing, and they prefer proportional fonts. Traditional plain-text emails with hard newlines after 78 characters don't work well for them: Either the newlines appear in odd places, or the text is reflowed (badly) despite the hard newlines.

My question: How should my plain-text email be formatted to make them happy, without breaking the experience for plain-text users like myself?

I know about “format-flowed” (RFC 3676) which allows marking plain-text paragraphs as reflowable while keeping the classic sub-78-chars-per-line appearance for old clients. Unfortunately, it is not supported by many email clients that would benefit from them most (including many web mailers).

Many emails clients simply generate very long lines (without newlines) that are intended to be displayed as flowed paragraphs. Is that a universally accepted standard now? I can see three issues with it:

  1. RFC 5322 limits the line length to 998 characters. What's with paragraphs that are longer than that?

  2. Can text quoted with “>” be reflowed at all?

  3. It breaks old clients that do not know when or how to reflow very long lines.

Is there any other standard to mark plain-text emails as reflowable?

Note that I am quite flexible in what I generate. My email client is extremely configurable to start with, and I can hack it where I need to (I'm using GNUS in Emacs).

Also note that this question is not about HTML-formatted emails. I'm aware of them, I can read them, I can even generate them if needed — but this question is strictly about plain-text emails.

Finally, receiving email in any format is not an issue for me. GNUS can display all plain text formats (as well as HTML-formatted emails) satisfactorily.

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    you sound like you have a lot more expertise than me. i'm curious under what situation has anybody said to you that a plain text email you sent was poorly formatted or unreadable? And from the other perspective, the only time I ever got a badly formatted email (faint bright yellow font) I just pasted it into notepad and I could read it. I'm sure if somebody is so picky as to complain about the formatting of an email they or their community would have guidelines that suit them. The only complaint re formatting I ever got was to send a plain text email 'cos that's all that they accept.
    – barlop
    Oct 17, 2014 at 9:37
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    @barlop Most people do not complain about badly formatted email. But I know many people (including myself) who care — and interpret badly formatted email as a sign for being careless and unprofessional. There are situations where I need my email messages to “just work” without any of this getting in the way. Even just the possibility that a receiver would have to copy&paste my message in order to read it would be a total disaster.
    – altruizine
    Oct 17, 2014 at 9:57
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    i'm also against the idea of an email that has to be copy/pasted into notepad. I think to most people in business, the fact that a plain text email is more compatible will not pass through their minds and an html email would be more professional to them, as html has more formatting options that can make things clearer, if the email requires some subtitles at least. If you are concerned about peoples' standards for how email should look then perhaps you can't go far wrong by observing how they format email they send to you.
    – barlop
    Oct 17, 2014 at 11:55
  • I believe you should just use format=flowed. You want badly upset anyone, since they will get 78 chars-per-line; and this will encourage webmail apps to adopt it already. Also, make sure to complain loudly to any webmail provider that doesn't!
    – einpoklum
    Sep 30, 2015 at 16:09
  • On 1: If messages is sent as MIME text/plain, encodings like quoted-printable (or worse, base64) would break the lines long before 998 characters.... (This does make stuff trickier to read in a non-MIME aware email client though...)
    – Gert van den Berg
    Jan 9, 2017 at 8:27

1 Answer 1

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I found an extensive webpage on this topic discussing RFC2822, RFC1855, RFC5322 and RFC2646 and various problems. It mentions a conservative line length of 65 chars.

http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html

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