[pianotech] wrap - no wrap lines

[Jim Moy]

No conspiracies involved. Just diverse software interacting in
disorganized fashion.

On sending, messages can be encoded by your email program as HTML or
text. It usually sends both simultaneously, with the text being
derived from the HTML you entered. (The original intent for this
behavior is from the 90's when there were email programs that didn't
understand HTML.) This derivation is a lossy process, and since line
breaks are not semantically significant in HTML, the resulting text
follows suit and is not wrapped before being shipped off to the email
server.

If you use the web interface to read these messages on mail.ptg.org,
what you are seeing is the HTML template used by the archival
component of Mailman (pipermail). This archiver grabs the text part of
the email and wraps it in <pre> tags in the template, and stores it
out in the archives where the web server can pick it up for viewing.
Take the intent of the <pre> tag, which is to present text with no
formatting by the browser, and combine it with the loss of line breaks
in the encoding performed by the sending email program, and you get
the unwrapped text you see on the mail.ptg.org site. Pipermail
considers the HTML part an "attachment" and stores it off separately.
(You may see these linked as "An HTML attachment was scrubbed.")

Thunderbird has Composition options that let you choose when and where
HTML and/or text is sent. Gmail's plain text option is what I'm using,
and is simpler. Email, being one of the oldest protocols on the
Internet, has accreted interpretations, conventions, rules both obeyed
and ignored, and so defies being "fixed."

Jim