The correct way to display a mail that’s not format=flowed is as-is (after MIME decoding), without any changes in line breaks. Well, your criticism of Google’s defect is perfectly valid, but your suggestion is just as broken as the current state of affairs. Follow me on Twitter, Mastodon, and GitHub. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Unicode, performance, and security get me excited. I work on Chrome DevTools and the V8 JavaScript engine at Google. That way, no hard-wrapping of the email’s actual contents is necessary. Summaryĭear Gmail team, please consider Quoted-Printable-encoding plain text emails composed using the Gmail web interface as shown in the above example, just like you do for HTML emails. This way, the lines wrap nicely (no forced line breaks) when viewing the email in Gmail or in another mail client. Si enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lo=īortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy = With Quoted-Printable encoding, it could look like this instead: Content-Type: text/plain charset=UTF-8Ĭontent-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Note that it contains hard line breaks to satisfy the 78-characters-per-line limit: Content-Type: text/plain charset=UTF-8 Here’s what the source of a plain text email composed in Gmail looks like. In fact, Gmail already kind of supports this: it’s capable of decoding and displaying Quoted-Printable-encoded emails flawlessly, and it encodes HTML emails with it before sending them - it just doesn’t do the same thing for plain text emails (yet). It is perfectly possible to send non-hard-wrapped plain text emails by using the Quoted-Printable encoding as defined by RFC 2045. Sure enough - the problem can be solved without violating any standards and without exceeding the 78-characters-per-line limit. But if this is what causes the broken behavior in Gmail, how come other mail clients don’t have the same issue? They have to respect the line length limit too, right? The solution It’s true that section 2.1.1 of RFC 2822 recommends a maximum of 78 characters per line (excluding the CRLF newline characters that end each line) in the source of email messages. The 78 characters per line is not a limitation implemented by Google, but rather an internet standard for plain text messages (RFC 2822) recommended and promoted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). After some painful back-and-forth, this was the response of the Google Enterprise Support team: So I did - I asked whether the hard-wrapping behavior for plain text emails could be disabled. Since I’m a Google Apps for Business customer, I get to file support tickets in hopes of getting issues like these fixed. This behavior annoys pretty much anyone who sends plain text emails from the Gmail web client. on a smartphone:Ĭombined with the auto-wrapping due to the small viewport, there are now two lines in the message with just one word on them. This is especially annoying when viewing such emails on small viewports, e.g. Instead of filling up the available screen width and letting the text flow naturally, the automatically inserted hard breaks ensure no line is longer than 78 characters. Here’s a screenshot of such an email, in Gmail:Īnd here’s what that same email looks like in another email client (in this case, OS X’s Mail.app): Ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation Nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam What would actually get sent is the following: Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. If you would send this message, for example: Unfortunately, Gmail hard-wraps emails that are composed in plain text mode before sending them. Gmail remembers your preference, so any new emails you compose after that are automatically in plain text mode, too. In the ‘new email’ window, click the downwards arrow and check ‘Plain text mode’. Luckily, it’s possible to opt-out of that and use plain text email instead. By default, composing a new email in Gmail results in an HTML email under the hood - even if you don’t use any formatting.
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