Bug 494279

Dear KMail devs,

currently, one can specify automatic line breaking after a defined number of chars. Line breaks are added automatically then. The problem with this approach is that if one views such an email on another device, the formatting is sometimes messed up. For mailing list etc. this is fine, but if I look at an email line breaked at e.g. 76 chars using K9Mail on my phone, such a line doesn't fit on the screen. A line is wrapped to two, and the second line contains the line break in the middle. This messes up the layout and makes such emails hard to read.

What I do now is to turn off automatic line breaking when I don't write to a mailing list, so that line breaks are added automatically when displaying such an email, defined by the screen width.

This now leads to a contrary effect when reading such an email using KMail on my desktop: The lines are only wrapped at the screen or window border and are hard to read, because they are way too long. One can open such an email in an extra window and draw it smaller, but for the fixed view, this is not possible without resizing KMail's main window at all.

What would be an approach to make desktop and mobile use similarly usable would be an option for a maximum line width after which lines are wrapped. Like some movable splitter in the message view part that acts as a limit for the message width. This way, one could easily limit the displayed line length when displaying an email with long lines, without opening it in an extra window.

I tried to add some QSplitter to the message view as a prove of concept, but I must admit that KMail's sources are a bit too hard to hack on for me ;-) I'm pretty sure this would be quite easy to implement if one knows the code better.

However, it would be very nice if this was added if you think this would be beneficial for KMail – imo it definitely would be.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers, Tobias