Re: Sending mail: line wrapping and quoted-printable encoding

[Radu Butoi <rbutoi@gmail.com>]

Hi Gregor,

Gregor Zattler <telegraph@gmx.net> writes:

> Hi Radu, emacs users,
> * Radu Butoi <rbutoi@gmail.com> [2020-04-26; 14:44]:
>> Gregor Zattler <telegraph@gmx.net> writes:
>>> * Radu Butoi <rbutoi@gmail.com> [2020-04-25; 20:19]:
>>>> I've recently set up my mail in Emacs, and it works
>>>> well. Gmail, though, doesn't support [1] format=flowed,
>>>> resulting in the hard-to-read comb effect when viewing
>>>> on mobile, which I'd like to avoid. Doing some more
>>>> research, I see that the quoted-printable encoding
>>>> (which Gmail does support [2], and I've confirmed) can
>>>> also be used to avoid hard line breaks while keeping
>>>> under the line length limit.
>>>
>>> actually I read the two resources you provided as gmail
>>> displays format=flowed formatted emails but does not
>>> allow a web interface user to send such email.
>>>
>>> Sine you want to send emails with emacs everything should
>>> be fine?
>>
>> It has worked in the past, but the redesign from ~two
>> years ago removed it again. Apologies on the misleading
>> link -- here's [1] some from more recently. I also
>> confirmed it doesn't work.
>
> OK, but since the web page which states that Gmail wraps
> quoted-printable encoded emails is even older than the ones
> stating that Gmail does not wrap format=flowed any more,
> perhaps quoted-printable also will not work?
>
> And then there is the question who other providers will show
> quoted-printable E-Mails in their clients (web interfaces).

I appreciate your skepticism here :-) -- but from everything I've read the quoted-printable encoding is well-supported by most/all email clients. It is from RFC2045 (MIME), whereas f=f is the lesser-supported RFC3676. Doing a search of my maildir, I find a large majority of them contain it. To test this, I'll be sending this message without hard-wrapping and with the Q-P encoding. If it shows up fine, I think I need to `edebug` the Emacs MIME library to find out exactly what's going wrong.

>
>>>> More generally, since I'm new to terminal-based email,
>>>> what is the etiquette around hard-wrapping (or not)?
>>>> Would it be rude to send paragraphs as one logical line
>>>> (wrapped-in-transmission by quoted-printable) and expect
>>>> people to soft-wrap?
>>>
>>> I send emails with lines no longer than 65 characters and
>>> my mail client (notmuch/message/emacs) allows me to fill
>>> the paragraphs while I type.
>>
>> Same here (notmuch), using the default message-fill-column
>> of 72. I also set notmuch-wash-wrap-lines-length so that
>> incoming long lines are wrapped. Is this a fair
>> expectation to set on everyone? It's one of the first
>> things I did, since I still get converted HTML mail that
>> would otherwise take up the full width of my screen.
>>
>>> I assume today's smartphones to be more than capable of
>>> showing 65 chars in one line.
>>
>> I'm afraid not: here's [2] how your email looks like on my
>> Pixel 4 XL, a considerably big phone.
>
> thanks a lot for this screenshot.  Obviously this also
> depends on the users font size.  I now re-wraped this whole
> email to 60 chars per line and hope it displays well.

Ah, there's no need to do that, since it is clearly Gmail who is at fault here. Emacs is my main way or reading and writing mail, I'd just like to have the option to use my phone.

Thanks for your responses! And let me know if this shows up okay.
-Radu