No conspiracies involved. Just diverse software interacting in disorganized fashion. On sending, messages can be encoded by your email program as HTML or text. It usually sends both simultaneously, with the text being derived from the HTML you entered. (The original intent for this behavior is from the 90's when there were email programs that didn't understand HTML.) This derivation is a lossy process, and since line breaks are not semantically significant in HTML, the resulting text follows suit and is not wrapped before being shipped off to the email server. If you use the web interface to read these messages on mail.ptg.org, what you are seeing is the HTML template used by the archival component of Mailman (pipermail). This archiver grabs the text part of the email and wraps it in <pre> tags in the template, and stores it out in the archives where the web server can pick it up for viewing. Take the intent of the <pre> tag, which is to present text with no formatting by the browser, and combine it with the loss of line breaks in the encoding performed by the sending email program, and you get the unwrapped text you see on the mail.ptg.org site. Pipermail considers the HTML part an "attachment" and stores it off separately. (You may see these linked as "An HTML attachment was scrubbed.") Thunderbird has Composition options that let you choose when and where HTML and/or text is sent. Gmail's plain text option is what I'm using, and is simpler. Email, being one of the oldest protocols on the Internet, has accreted interpretations, conventions, rules both obeyed and ignored, and so defies being "fixed." Jim
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