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Comment by jlokier | Hacker News Reader

I use Mutt too.

Although nobody has commented on my mails, I know some people read them on mobile, and because plain text is formatted for an 80-column terminal, it doesn't reflow nicely on their mobile devices so they have to scroll side-to-side to read my message.

I think people don't know that's because I use Mutt, but a hard-to-read mail is not an impression I want to convey sometimes.

Also, sometimes my mails render in Courier font for some people when regular HTML mails show up in Arial, just because of the content type.

So if possible I'd like to write Markdown or similar and have that auto-formatted to HTML mail before sending. Not sure if there's a good way to do that in Mutt.

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It's funny this should come up on HN today, because just this week out of nowhere i thought i'd try Mutt again (after having been a Mutt user since mid-2000s, but switching to mu4e for the last ±5 years).

What i used to do back in the day, and appeared to work fine when i tested this weekend, is so-called flowed mode. [1] I think it's a controversial feature, because it's a brittle hack, but anecdotally an email i sent this weekend as a test displayed fine on an iPhone.

And indeed, i'm totally with you on wanting to use/send text email but not look like a freak with weirdly broken 80-char lines in paragraphs.

1. https://rinzewind.org/blog-en/2017/a-small-trick-for-sending...

Interesting point. I can only do very limited testing, but I just sent an email with one very long line from mutt on my laptop to my gmail address. The long line was not broken, and the display flowed perfectly on the gmail client on Android.

I think you should be able to use a hook in Mutt to process the markdown to HTML (using Pandoc) before sending. I've never tried anything like this—it has interesting possibilities.

It's entirely possible to send mail as format=flowed plain text, so that messages will rewrap nicely on any screen. I do it all the time with Mutt, it's actually very easy.

I know about format=flowed. But does that actually solve the problem?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20514314

> The suggestion to use `format=flowed` doesn’t help, as the standard is ill-supported: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/17/format-flowed/ I’ve researched the issue far and wide and the only way to have responsive, nicely wrapped emails is using HTML.

https://cpbotha.net/2016/09/27/thunderbird-support-of-rfc-36...

> Update on 2019-07-16 The current GMail web-ui ignores format=flowed and renders such emails with hard linebreaks everywhere. Thank you Google for violating yet more email standards.

Most people I correspond with where I care about my mail looking "normal" to them seem to use Gmail (about 30-50%), then Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird.

format=flowed does not solve the problem, but you don’t have to resort to HTML. This guy¹ has the right idea: just make each paragraph in your email a single long line (but no more than 998 characters). The idea that we need to break lines at 78 characters, or whatever, is false. Long lines will be wrapped responsively in any sane client, so the reader will have a good experience.

[1]https://www.arp242.net/email-wrapping.html

One of the complaints I've had is that my mail had to be horizontally scrolled to be read.

One long line sounds likely to make the problem for that person worse not better!

That was a while ago though. Clients may have changed.

I'd love to know if someone has put the time into cross-platform tests for this sort of thing.

The only thing I'm completely confident of at the moment is that multipart/mixed text+HTML works for every client.

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