I've noticed in our tracker instance that often messages appear not to
wrap, and a paragraph will be displayed as a single, long line.
Apparently, this issue is not unique to my instance, as it can also be
observed in issue1795256.

If I view that issue in the latest version of Firefox, msg2481 and
msg2482 are displayed as very short, wide messages, in this case causing
the view to expand to 4 times the width of the browser. This view is
highly unfriendly, as it requires the user to scroll horizontally to
read the message or determine the author and date for the messages.

I have not yet been able to characterize what causes these messages to
be formatted such. It may be the mail gateway or other factor.

I've observed this behavior even with Roundup 1.4.21.

I suspect though haven't confirmed this issue is isolated to e-mail
messages.

I've searched through the options for the e-mail config and don't see
any options for affecting line wrap. Is this behavior expected? Has it
been characterized before? What options are available to work around the
issue?

Hi Jason,
thanks for your report.
Can you create an easy example that can be reproduced?
I wonder what happens if there is a long word (having not whitespace),
even when entered via the web. I guess that something it even is
preferable to not line-break those "words", e.g. when they are urls.

Experiment:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstu
vwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Another try
http://issues.roundup-
tracker.org/issue2550793?@ok_message=msg%204793%20created%0Aissue%2025507
93%20nosy%2C%20messages%20edited%20ok&@template=item

I don't believe the issue happens due to long words. In all cases, the
text is simple prose, like this sentence, but for some reason appears
un-wrapped. It would be hard to reproduce, because I believe it mainly
(only) happens when content is pulled from a mail server.

One thing I might be able to do is find an e-mail message which
generated an unwrapped msg. I'll see if I can track one down.

Attached is a pickle of a POP3 message (as returned by POP3_SSL.retr)
that generated long lines in my tracker. Load it with:

    import pickle
    with open('msg.pickle', 'rb') as f:
        msg = pickle.load(f)

I've hand-manipulated the lines of the message and replaced names of
individuals and organizations with different names of the same length
(for privacy).

Here is an excerpt of one of the long lines from msg[1]:

 b'We should have some more answers from this one vendor this week, and
if not=',
 b'hing is satisfactorily received for this one, we will keep continue
to move=',
 b' until we have a solution.',

As you can see, the e-mail payload contains continuation blocks
(trailing equals signs). Presumably, these are used construct new lines
that are far more than 80 characters. Because these are not wrapped
before they're displayed in roundup, they cause the display to be very
difficult to read.

This still is a problem. To easily reproduce, just send an email to the tracker which includes very long lines (just as this mail I'm just sending to the tracker). Of course you need to write many words, otherwise the line would not be very long. I repeat: You need many words, so the line is long enough to show the problem.

In our local installation I just added this to style.css:

pre {
  white-space: pre-wrap;
}

It seems to work well, copy&paste of code retains the long lines in the
target. Should this be included in all included Roundup templates?

changeset:   4862:7ed1893ea3ac
user:        Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas@intevation.de>
date:        Tue Mar 11 10:13:58 2014 +0100
description:
issue2550793: Wrap messages with very long lines in the web interface.

Applied to templates classic, devel, minimal and website/issues.
jinja2 and responsive should already have this through bootstrap.

The change is now deployed to this instance, too, so msg4993 now shows
the wrapping effect.

Thanks to everyone for the help on this!

In our company we recently had some discussion about this topic.

For western languages it is widely accepted that for best 
readability the length of lines of text should be something 
between 60 and 65 characters per line.  

This means Roundup should normally store text in format=fixed (as
opposed to format=flowed as discussed in
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt ).  
However E-mails containing text with format=flowed became 
increasingly popular. Certain foreign languages (like chinese) 
may even require some other special handling. (see 
https://sourceforge.net/p/roundup/mailman/message/34879502/ )

AFAIK currently (1.5.1) the mail gateway of Roundup does nothing with 
emails containing huge lines as seen here in msg4993 and store them
as is.  To get those displayed in readable form with reasonable 
short line lengths the user is forced to narrow the width of the
browser window.

It might be an option to pipe incoming emails through the 
utility program ``fmt -w 65`` to enforce hard line breaks before
the emails gateway hands them over to Roundup for storing.

Hi Peter,
thanks for your input on the matter.
Can you open a new issue, I think this one was successfully concluded
by making sure that we get some wrapping for long lines with words.
You are proposing additional improvements, thanks for doing so!

Regards,
Bernhard

I've created issue2550902 as suggested by Bernhard in msg5468.
Peter.