I have to say that I'm baffled at the perverse pride that people seem
to take in being so technically backward that they're unable to handle
the mail that 99% of the world uses today. While not being a fan of
overdecorated HTML and endless font changes, and strongly preferring a
mail program that lets me keep my fingers on the keyboard, I can deal
with it. (I use Alpine, keep meaning to take another look at mutt.)
I remember how to punch drum cards, but I have no interest in using
one to send mail in 2012.
For the large majority of mail that is written in paragraphs rather
than tables, line wrapping is a useful feature, regardless of the
character set, particularly for those of us who sometimes read our
mail on a tablet or phone while changing planes. For mail that is a
table and stuff has to line up in columns, use HTML tables. That's
what they're for.
R's,
John
PS: Yes, this is top posted. You can deal with that, too.
Unfortunately there's some stuff going around that line
wrapping with hard line terminations is retrograde and goes
back to punch cards. I guess that's probably true but
aside from the fact that I'm retrograde and go back to
punch cards, myself, application line wrapping and flowed
text don't deal well (yet) with multiple character sets,
fonts, etc. and I'll take readability over application
purity every single time.