Description of problem: Every time I open an compose document, the compose window is about 68 characters wide causing me to manually resize it so I dont end up with the 'flip-flop' as my text goes off screen and then wraps around. I am using an evolution directory tree that I have used since Red Hat shipped in 7.3 so it may be an upgrade issue but I do not know where to look :(. Resizing the text fonts in gnome font control and choosing a different monospace font do NOT change evolution on this. Finally I have duplicated the problem in RHEL-2.9.5 (and have been told by a couple of other people here.. that they have seen it in 2.9.5 and find it very annoying.
Choosing a different font in the evolution settings will change things so that you can fit more. The window basically has a minimum size set that's still small enough to fit on small displays -- making this larger would make evolution less usable on those systems. In a perfect world, the size of the composer window would be remembered when you open new ones, but that's a change that would need to happen upstream and not in a Red Hat specific patch.