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I'm wondering if word wrapping should be applied in text emails? And what about HTML emails? If so, what character would you normally wrap at?
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In Outlook Options, select Mail. Scroll to Message format. In Automatically wrap text at character, enter a number to indicate where you want Outlook to wrap text. Keep it between 65 and 70 characters.
Word and line wrap are features that automatically moves words and lines that exceed a certain length onto a new line.
In computing, word wrapping is a process by which a word which comes at the end of a line is automatically moved onto a new line in order to keep the text within the margins.
Word wrap is a word processing feature that forces all text to be confined within defined margins. When a line of text is filled, the word processor automatically moves the text to the next line, so the user doesn't have to press the return key after every line.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322#section-2.1.1
2.1.1. Line Length Limits
There are two limits that this specification places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF.
The 998 character limit is due to limitations in many implementations that send, receive, or store IMF messages which simply cannot handle more than 998 characters on a line. Receiving implementations would do well to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line for robustness sake. However, there are so many implementations that (in compliance with the transport requirements of [RFC5321]) do not accept messages containing more than 1000 characters including the CR and LF per line, it is important for implementations not to create such messages.
The more conservative 78 character recommendation is to accommodate the many implementations of user interfaces that display these messages which may truncate, or disastrously wrap, the display of more than 78 characters per line, in spite of the fact that such implementations are non-conformant to the intent of this specification (and that of [RFC5321] if they actually cause information to be lost). Again, even though this limitation is put on messages, it is incumbent upon implementations that display messages to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line (certainly at least up to the 998 character limit) for the sake of robustness.
See also: RFC2045, RFC2046, RFC2047, RFC2049, RFC4289 & RFC6838 for MIME specs.
It's fun reading RFCs. You know you love it :-)
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RFC 2646 says:
The Text/Plain media type is the lowest common denominator of Internet email, with lines of no more than 997 characters (by convention usually no more than 80)
Another popular standard is to wrap at 72 characters. This dates back to many console applications (like EDIT and many BBS interfaces) that displayed text within an ASCII "window" including a border and scrollbar, allowing slightly less than 80 characters to be displayed.
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