hans aberg writes, with respect to a request to wrap to 72 characters in e-mail: Phillip Helbig mentions the email problem specifically when reading quotes in email: Even though it is possible to avoid it hard wrapping of email text, most emailers do it, because there may be email readers that cannot handle it well otherwise. But it is not necessary to do it: With styled text, quotes are enclosed with an environment <excerpt>... </excerpt>, in my email reader displayed with a bar at the left hand side of the quote. So quotes can be formatted and quoted as many times as you please. And emailers that can read such email are for free, at least on Mac's and PC's, so there is not much reason to not upgrade. (I mean, if there are advanced, expensive computers that cannot do the simple things that all the inexpensive computers can do, why should we all others bother?) i can sympathize with this, but i'm unfortunately on the wrong end of this, working on a vms system. when e-mail lines exceed 256 characters, they are often truncated when they reach me. this is much more serious than something that is simply hard to read. though i don't much appreciate all the =-coded translation that occurs in mime-originated messages, i can usually cope with it. it becomes a real problem, however, when i receive e-mail from a list in digested form, some of it mime-processed, some of it not -- then it's impossible to put the entire thing through a mime translator and end up with a reliable result. this is especially pernicious on tex source. there really is some value to the shorter lines. (apologies for being off-topic.) -- barbara beeton