Description of problem: Evolution is really bad about word-wrapping and the ability to turn it off. Today I ditched Thunderbird and went to Evolution because Thunderbird was taking liberties with my content, deleting spaces and such. I looked all over the Evolution preferences trying to find settings relating to word wrap. I found none. IMHO, that's just bad. So: under "Composer preferences" there should be a check box so I can turn word wrap off. In fact, I NEVER want word wrap because I always do my own formatting, and often, I'm sending patches as inline text that are destroyed by it. Email clients should NOT change my content. Now I know there's a button that says "Preformat", but it's user- unfriendly. First of all, it's unclear what it means and that it has anything to do with word wrap. Second, there's a "Preformat" in the body, and another "Preformat" under Format->Heading and it's unclear which is which or what the difference is (if any). Changing it after the fact doesn't seem to undo the damage, but I didn't spend a lot of time playing with it either. At the very least, you should be able to select a default text type so you don't have to pull down "Preformat" for every email you compose. It needs to be a user preference. Start it out as "Normal" but let the user change it to default to Preformat. I still think a simple check box for word wrap is more clear to ordinary users. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): evolution-2.8.3-2.fc6 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Compose an email 2. Select and paste in a bunch of source code from xemacs for example 3. Hit the send button Actual results: Your source code is destroyed by word-wrap. Expected results: Email should not take liberties with my content unless I allow it. Additional info: Sorry if I come off as sounding brash, but I shouldn't have to use mutt to compose a simple email and have it arrive at the other end unscathed. Programs like Thunderbird and Evolution can do better.
This sounds very much along the lines of Ben Kahn's blog post about useability problems with Evolution's composer. http://xkahn.zoned.net/blog/2007/02/18/fixing-the-evolution-composer/ He opened an upstream bug [1] to track the problem, and the upstream developers (including myself) are laying the groundwork to start addressing these issues. Please feel free to add comments to the discussion upstream. [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408707
I actually want Thunderbird to word wrap my message but leave patches alone. I found this plug-in (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2351) which allows to user to easily toggle word wrap, but it is tedious to turn ww on and off. Maybe the compose window should have a paste box which does not format content for pasting patches, code, etc. Or maybe just a seperator: Message --Paste------------------------------ Patch