Bugzilla

> 19 years later and you are still around. That's passion.

Thanks. Yes, it is!

> sending an different flowed text email to Gmail and looking at it in the Inbox

You're sending it to yourself, and read it in the same client as you typed it. *You* might see it the way you typed. Your recipient might not. The WYSIWYG is an illusion that's true for you, but not for your readers. I argue that's even worse, because deceptive. Nobody has ever coherently defined how plaintext email is supposed to work, and requirements evolved a lot over time, and each client adapted in its own way. You cannot be sure how your recipient sees your email.

format=flowed cleans a lot of this up and clearly specifies what should happen in which case.

> html. It seems to follow the WYSIWYG concept much more

HTML isn't WYSIWYG, either. It's been semantic since its inception, and specifically not for layout. CSS would be for layout, but even that specifically allows clients to adapt rendering. The renderer adapts the page to the device, including line breaks. HTML also has soft line wrapping by default, like format=flowed.

format=flowed has both soft and hard line breaks. If you want to type a hard linebreak, just press ENTER on your keyboard in the Thunderbird editor. The default is soft wrapping, which is what most people want 95% of the time.

> 19 years later and you are still around. That's passion.

Thanks. Yes, it is!

> sending an different flowed text email to Gmail and looking at it in the Inbox

You're sending it to yourself, and read it in the same client as you typed it. *You* might see it the way you typed. Your recipient might not. The WYSIWYG is an illusion that's true for you, but not for your readers. I argue that's even worse, because deceptive. Nobody has ever coherently defined how plaintext email is supposed to work, and requirements evolved a lot over time, and each client adapted in its own way. You cannot be sure how your recipient sees your email.

format=flowed cleans a lot of this up and clearly specifies what should happen in which case.

> html. It seems to follow the WYSIWYG concept much more

HTML isn't WYSIWYG, either. It's been semantic since its inception, and specifically not for layout. CSS would be for layout, but even that specifically allows clients to adapt rendering. The renderer adapts the page to the device, including line breaks. HTML also has soft line wrapping by default, like format=flowed.

format=flowed has both soft and hard line breaks. If you want to type a hard linebreak, just press ENTER on your keyboard in the Thunderbird editor. The default is soft wrapping, which is what most people want 95% of the time.

You don't like that, and that's fine, so you can disable it.