Author Topic: Why Roundcube limits line length in plain text mode?  (Read 2557 times)

Offline Racoon

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Why Roundcube limits line length in plain text mode?
« on: April 04, 2021, 07:52:31 PM »
For the life of me, I cannot understand this. It's 2021 and we still cannot figure out how to send plain text emails. Why on earth Roundcube breaks lines in plain text messages?? Why can't we leave line length alone and let the mail client break it for you, depending on the user's screen space. Every time I send message from Outlook, it looks beautiful. But when I am on the road and have to use this Roundcube, this is how my messages get sent to people:

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is
not simply
random text. It has roots in a piece of
classical Latin
literature from 45 BC, making it over
2000 years old.
Richard McClintock, a Latin professor
at Hampden-
Sydney College in Virginia, looked up
one of the more
obscure Latin words, consectetur,
from a Lorem
Ipsum passage, and going through


As you can see it breaks text at 78 or 80 characters, whatever the default limit is.
Is there some sort of international standard for this limit? No way to disable I guess.
Emails sent from Rouncube look like crap and hard to read. I avoid it like a plague.

Offline JohnDoh

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Re: Why Roundcube limits line length in plain text mode?
« Reply #1 on: April 05, 2021, 04:30:54 AM »
RFCs define the formatting of plain text emails and you are welcome to research those yourself. Roundcube allows you to configure both the max line length and weather or not format=flowed is used when sending plain text emails.
Roundcube Plugins: Contextmenu, SpamAssassin Prefs, and more…

Offline Racoon

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Re: Why Roundcube limits line length in plain text mode?
« Reply #2 on: April 05, 2021, 08:57:23 PM »
Hello, thank you for your answer. Is this setting format=flowed a user setting, or admin setting? Because I could not find it in my settings, and my admins have no idea what the problem is and they don't care about crooked text, as long as there are no security issues, they are not going to change anything.

Right now I managed to get Thunderbird portable to work with the server, will see how it goes.

Offline JohnDoh

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Re: Why Roundcube limits line length in plain text mode?
« Reply #3 on: April 06, 2021, 08:05:56 AM »
its something for the admins to take care of
Roundcube Plugins: Contextmenu, SpamAssassin Prefs, and more…

Offline Racoon

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Re: Why Roundcube limits line length in plain text mode?
« Reply #4 on: April 26, 2021, 10:07:20 AM »
Couple of updates:

format=flowed is NOT the right setting for this issue. Even if you set this, most other email clients, notably Outlook, won't support this format and text will still appear broken, see my first post for example of broken email.

Most webmail implementations, Outlook, Evolution, and Mac OS X Mail don't support it. Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, PostBox, Eudora, Pine, M2 (Opera mail program) and LuxSci webmail do. It is a interesting standard that just didn't catch on.

The way I fixed the issue in Thunderbird is to use Config Editor:
Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor
mailnews.wraplength = 72 change to 0

This disables truncation of text at 72 characters. Issue resolved.
More details here: https://superuser.com/questions/378184/tell-thunderbird-not-to-truncate-or-wrap-lines-when-sending-email