format=flowed

[Cameron Simpson]

On 19Dec2018 13:05, Victor Sudakov <vas at sibptus.ru> wrote:
>Does this very message conform to the flowed format? [...]

I think so. It renders just fine in my mutt (flows nicely) and when I 
look at the headers and text directly it all seems good. And if I send 
both your message and one of mine off to my gmail account they both 
render badly.

You're doing the right thing, and GMail are not.

Of course the feature of format-flowed is that it is still pretty 
readable when rendered directly without knowing about the format, which 
is why the soft folds are meant to be near the conventional width.

A bit of a poke around suggests that GMail doesn't understand 
format=flowed at all; it has no way to generate it itself for plain text 
and clearly doesn't render it correctly either. It wouldn't be the first 
time their handling of text/plain was ... substandard. They had another 
problem for years and years which currently escapes me.

Maybe the following ghastly workaround? You know how lots of mail 
clients send HTML and often an (awful awful) text/plain to go with it?  
Maybe compose in format=flowed and include a parallel basic HTML form to 
accompany it? I've not given any thought to how to make that easy.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>