Why does Mail.app on Leopard force me to use plain text?

Question

In Mail.app I found that many of my emails are forced to be:

Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=WINDOWS-1252;
format=flowed;
delsp=yes

with the charset changing depending on what characters are being used in the email. I am confounded because I have set the the message format to be 'Rich Text' in the preferences.

The reason for this is that I don't want my messages to be clipped at the 75 column mark (which many of the seem to be). At first I thought this was because I was using GMail as my SMTP server so I tried to force the output to be Rich Text. I prefer using plain text but want my email flowed since I do a lot of formatting text by hand, and sometimes line-breaks make the text less readable.

How do I force Mail to flow the text and not chop it? Here's a copy of the raw headers in my 'Sent' box. Mail displays this as flowed, but you can see that it's chopped in the raw source.

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, the clipping that I was seeing was being forced by the receiving client; the actual default behavior for leopard mail is to flow the plain-text. If you're seeing that your sent plain-text email is not being flowed it's probably an issue with the receiving client.