Thunderbird, how to break lines when sending text emails?

1

I don't get this running in Thunderbird 52.1.0. This is what I want:

  1. The write-email editor should automatically break lines after 72 characters.
  2. The receiver of this email should get the text formatted in the same way like I saw it in my editor.

This was very default behavior of almost any reasonable MUA I've ever used in past.

I've played around with different combinations of config keys like the ones below, but no luck:

mailnews.wraplength
mail.compose.wrap_to_window_width
plain_text.wrap_long_lines
view_source.wrap_long_lines

Bonus question:

  1. How can I make exceptions, i.e. disabling the break for certain lines. For example when posting well formatted code snippets.

rudimeier

Posted 2017-05-19T09:52:24.163

Reputation: 131

So you're one of those really, really strange people that just insert line breaks in the middle of a sentence. There isn't really an automatism for this from what I can tell. If you want an exclusive line break just enter it as such and just write a sentence like you would. Let receiver decide how it's displayed. – Seth – 2017-05-19T10:40:25.680

1

@Seth It's not strange, it's kind of standard and required by any reasonable technical mailing list, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4297574/do-i-need-to-wrap-email-messages-longer-than-72-characters-in-a-line BTW I don't want to discuss the sense or non-sense. Just want to continue to write emails like I've learned it many years ago.

– rudimeier – 2017-05-19T10:54:05.480

With the default configuration of Thunderbird on 52.1.1 the behavior is just like you want it assuming you actually do write plain text mails (Account Settings » Composing & Addressing » Compose messages in HTML format is unchecked). You won't be able to toggle the behavior for a on line basis. Was this possible when you learned to write mails many years ago? As for mailing lists, it's common there, yes but time has moved on and in normal day to day mails it shouldn't be needed. – Seth – 2017-05-19T11:34:31.920

@Seth ok I will test it again with a clean config, this may take some time. BTW in past I was using another email client which is unfortunately not maintained anymore since 10 years. I'm just trying to find a usable replacement. I write 99% of all my emails in technical style. – rudimeier – 2017-05-19T12:25:04.103

No answers

Asked: 2017-05-19T09:52:24.163

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Active: 2017-05-19T09:52:24.163