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Comment by FiloSottile | Hacker News Reader

No, please don't send me emails in a format that will not reflow readably on my phone, especially if I didn't use the same format when emailing you. (The Fastmail instructions explicitly say to disable "When replying, use the same format as the original message".)

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That sounds like a bug in your phone. Perhaps you should report it to the vendor? Even my ancient Emacs mail reader can reflow plain text emails when I ask it to do so. It sometimes needs to be told on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, because otherwise it might also reflow ASCII art diagrams and such, but in practice I find it a minor problem.

> It sometimes needs to be told on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, because otherwise it might also reflow ASCII art diagrams and such

Yes exactly, there is no "one right way" to do it because you never know if a newline is a "hard enter" or just a "reflow to the next line". Every default will break something.

This is why you need some (minimal) markup, no matter what you do text-only email is broken for some use cases.

It's a tradeoff. I'm willing to accept some clumsyness in return for conceptual and technical simplicity. Others may feel different. In practice, most people who write plain text emails manage to format them pleasingly themselves (and 72 column plain text is perfectly readable on my phone, although I prefer not reading email there).

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