Gmail Text Problem

February 22, 2005 5:58 PM

Text in Gmail looks like like this after I have sent (or rec'vd) an email. Any idea how to fix this? Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

Someone made a good suggestion to configure the POP setting to Outlook or other emai client but that will not work as I do not use Outlook or Mozilla. Other than the POP route does anyone know how to fix this? The issue is not addressed in the Gmail Help Center and the Gmail Groups section has a recent posting of the same question that no one has answered. Help.

posted by mlis to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Response by poster: that should have been:

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
posted by mlis at 6:00 PM on February 22, 2005

do you mean that
it has line breaks
in
surprising places?

I'm assuming
you don't mean that it makes all the words
blah.

That's what gmail does. It breaks the line, hard, at the 79th letter. It won't look like it does in the compose box.
posted by bonaldi at 6:45 PM on February 22, 2005

Response by poster: Some email that I receive (from other Gmail users as well as other email providers) is normal - no line breaks (I have asked people w/the normal email but they do not know how to fix it).
posted by mlis at 6:51 PM on February 22, 2005

Hard line breaks have been the standard for a long time. Many command line mail clients do not do word wrapping.
posted by bh at 7:12 PM on February 22, 2005

The ones that don't get borked up are probably either already correctly wrapped somewhere before column 80, or are of the content type text/plain; format=flowed which tells the mail client to insert its own linebreaks where ever it's most convenient. See RFC 2646 for more than you ever wanted to know about it.
posted by fvw at 12:30 AM on February 23, 2005