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Some emails fromarrive fine but others arrive without automatic line wrapping - both ways from the same people. Why? how to fix?

  • 7 replies
  • 3 have this problem
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  • Last reply by jvank

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The problem of incoming emails failing to word-wrap is plaguing a handful of people I correspond with. My incoming emails from them are usually fine, but occasionally there's no word-wrap and each paragraph displays as a single line, requiring me to scroll and scroll and scroll to read it.

Again, the same people's emails sometimes arrive one way and sometimes another.

What causes this? How can I fix it so everything word-wraps properly?

The problem of incoming emails failing to word-wrap is plaguing a handful of people I correspond with. My incoming emails from them are usually fine, but occasionally there's no word-wrap and each paragraph displays as a single line, requiring me to scroll and scroll and scroll to read it. Again, the same people's emails sometimes arrive one way and sometimes another. What causes this? How can I fix it so everything word-wraps properly?

Chosen solution

BillTreloar said

As far as I know, the sender of these emails isn't using Thunderbird. Probably Outlook (if I had to guess).

In that case, it's likely they are composing in Word and then sending the Word document as an email via Outlook. It might help if they copied the content from Word and pasted it into an Outlook message as plain text. A bit more complicated, but less trouble for non-Outlook recipients.

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My guess is they are replying from their iPhone. Apple in their wisdom have their "own" definition of a carriage return. One of the reasons apple folks love apple is because it is supposed to "just work" unfortunately it is like Microsoft Products. it only "just works" with products from the same company.

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No, almost all of these messages are from people who work for me and originate on Windows PCs, not smartphones. Any other thoughts?

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The ones that wrap correctly may have been composed entirely by typing into the TB message composer, while the ones that don't may have been typed into a word processor and then pasted into a TB message, introducing non-standard formatting. If that's the case, content from other applications should be pasted into TB as Paste Without Formatting (Ctrl+Shift+V).

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As far as I know, the sender of these emails isn't using Thunderbird. Probably Outlook (if I had to guess).

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Chosen Solution

BillTreloar said

As far as I know, the sender of these emails isn't using Thunderbird. Probably Outlook (if I had to guess).

In that case, it's likely they are composing in Word and then sending the Word document as an email via Outlook. It might help if they copied the content from Word and pasted it into an Outlook message as plain text. A bit more complicated, but less trouble for non-Outlook recipients.

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Thanks — I'll suggest that. Bill

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So instead of turning on the old feature of "word-wrap" we just ask all senders to not use "outlook". Great solution, wish I would of thought of that. So how do you stop receiving emails generated from windows users? Thunderbird used to have a "word-wrap" feature, why can I not find it and turn it on?