Setting line length in Apple Mail

[david_blanchard]

Most modern email programs allow the text to flow to the width of the window. Resizing the window width then modifies the line length. There have been a few programs that would do a soft line wrap at user-defined widths (e.g., Mailsmith).

I know that I can resize the width of the window to create a similar effect. The downside is that it can have an impact on the number of columns displayed when using a 3-pane window. I prefer a fairly narrow line width of about 72 characters.

I would like to find a way to have user-defined line lengths in Apple Mail – or other modern mail apps – but have not found a way to do so.

And I would like to force incoming email to always use plain-text format. I think Apple Mail did this in the past. Again, this is something that Mailsmith did well.

Both of these features are easy to do when composing an email – but I want it to work on received email as well.

Mailsmith sends with the following:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

Note: running Mojave with Apple Mail v12.4.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

[ted1 (ted286)]

I hope you get a constructive answer regarding line lengths. I may not want a fixed width, but I do get frustrated when Apple Mail doesn’t word wrap within the visible window. Viewing mail in plain-text should also greatly reduce the risk of clicking untoward links.

[david_blanchard]

I have not found anything that will control the flow and appearance of received messages using Apples Mail app. This is one of the reasons I still use Mailsmith on macOS Mojave.

I did find two plugins that control the formatting of composed plain text messages: MailWrap and MailFlow.

MailWrap is a plugin for Apple Mail on macOS 10.12 and later, making it easier to compose well-formed and correctly wrapped plain text messages. It introduces line wrapping and paragraph filling operations, and extends the built-in indentation functions to work in plain text mode.

MailFlow is a plugin for Apple Mail on macOS 10.12 and later, fixing it to emit RFC2646 format=flowed plain text messages and taming its enthusiasm for quoted-printable transfer encoding.