Hi, hopefully this will be of some help.

First, ensure you have the formatting toolbar visible:

• If you cannot see "File, Edit, View...etc" at the top of the screen press the ALT key on the keyboard to bring it up, then click the following: View --> Toolbars --> Ensure there is a tick by the Formatting bar
• The previous option of Paragraph does have the line feed after carriage return but Body Text doesn't. In a new e-mail, choose this to see if this solves the problem.
• If all is good, you can set this as a Global option by:

1. In the main Thunderbird window, right click on your e-mail address below the Get Messages button and choose settings 2. Choose the Composition and addressing option and click the Global Composing Preferences button 3. On the General tab, under the HTML section, take the tick out of the box for "use paragraph format instead of body text by default" 4. Test by creating a new e-mail

Thank you for the help.

Unfortunately this does not work. The solution above of:

3. On the General tab, under the HTML section, take the tick out of the box for "use paragraph format instead of body text by default"

has no bearing on message window size and this never happened in past versions.

If I open a new composition window to the size of the whole screen width ( say 10,12,15,18 inches ) and write an email and send it in plain text only, Thunderbird is literally inserting line breaks / carriage returns at the same size of the composition window width. This should not be happening.

If I do the same again for a NEW message and shrink the composition widow to only 5" wide, and send it as plain text then that message has line breaks / carraige returns at the width of THAT window.

This is rediculous and now every email that comes back is a different size and unreadable even old messages from god knows how many years ago. It used to be ( since the beginning of thunderbird ) that there was no SEND formatting carriage returns being inserted into emails based on window size. There MUST be a way to prevent this because the above solution does not address this. If I sent a basic, plain text text message in text only, no matter what font I use, etc., when it is sent as plain text, it should be plain text, NO auto carriage returns, etc...

How can I specifically send plain text messages with NO predefined word wrap sizing / margin settings ? Thunderbird isn't MSword after all, it's plain text message sending. If I want to format a message in HTML then a ruler / GUI should be used.

How can we have Thunderbird set to the way it always was / as any basic plain text editor ( eg. Notepad ) works - NO margin setting / carriage returns @ window edge. This new "feature" and specifically for plain text message sending makes no sense.

Text wrapping in composed messages is determined by the mailnews.wraplength preference in Tools/Options/Advanced/General/Config. editor:

mailnews.wraplength = 72 wraps to a width of 72 characters, mailnews.wraplength = 0 wraps to the window mailnews.wraplength = -1 doesn't wrap at all.

sfhowes, this seems to work correctly when composing emails. thanks for that tip although this should clearly be a checkbox in the Tools-->Options-->Advanced Configuration section. I don't think anyone should have to go all the way into Config.editor just to set word wrap ( not a hard carriage return ) to be at the end of a window or preview pane ) and especially since this was never the case before some strange update that apparently just happened in Q2 2019

However, and much more specifically, now, a more problematic issue exists. when viewing messages in the standard Thunderbird right hand side Message Pane: View-->Layout-->Message Pane (checked) it seems in ALL text in any messages ( and in all modes: View-->Message Body--> Original HTML, Simple HTML, Plain Text ) there is a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of messages thus, making messages impossible to read. You have to grab a scroll bar to read messages when again this was never the case from the last versions of Thunderbird in Dec 2018.

Why would this ever be the case now ? after fixing what you suggested above, yes, your suggestion works perfectly for NEW compositions but reading any messages pre one that was created before applying your fix here, those messages are now impossible to read and a vertical scroll bar is popping up in the preview pane. very strange.

How can this horizontal scroll bar in the message preview pane be permanently removed? text in emails should just simply word wrap at the window edge unless there is a hard carriage return specifically placed in the text by the author ( not thunderbird, outlook, etc ) during composition and especially in plane text sending modes

this certainly is a very bizarre change to thunderbird and I'm sure we all agree it should be standard that word wrap is word wrap and not word wrap = insert a carriage return at some predetermined screen, pixel or word count size. maybe you agree.

I don't see a horizontal scroll bar in the Message Pane with the Classic View layout, even when the window is sized down; text is wrapped to the pane width. Only in Vertical View is there a scroll bar, when attached images are shown inline and exceed the width of the pane; text still wraps to the pane width. So, I can't explain what you see. Have you disabled flowed format, i.e. is mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support set to true in Config. editor?

sfhowes, thanks for the above but, ohhhhhh it's going to get more interesting now ;)

so, I've followed your instructions to apply the two adjustments to the advanced advanced configuration setting and it seemed to work great as I made a few tests. What became very interesting is that after the application of the

mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support set to true

when I sent the following message ( see image here ) to 3 people and CC'ed myself. What did I see ? Thunderbird is now inserting the "*" character into the emails? That is quite troubling. So let's be specific

I start typing a new message ( before or after your 2nd fix I've just mentioned above ) and Word after word, it looks great in composition mode. I then send the message in plain text and there is no "*" in that message. It arrives in my in box and the "*" character is embedded in the email I sent. See screen shot here.

When I'm typing any message and I get to the end of the screen in the message of a window and it wraps. Great. BUT if I hit a carriage return to end that paragraph, it jumps 2 lines down - this is not the way Thunderbird acted in the past. I am now forced to hold the shift key and hit carriage return to just move to the next line.

Can all of this mess just be disabled? Hitting return ( like in ANY text editor, word, etc., ) means next line as it should. And clearly, there should never be any "*"'s of any kind in messages that are sent, plain text or otherwise.

Please advise.

First, I don't advise changing mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support from its default value, false. Second, to make Enter separate paragraphs by a single line, uncheck 'Use paragraph format...' in Tools/Options/Composition/General.

As for the asterisks, I'm not sure what you need to change; sending in HTML-format is probably a better approach.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=478841

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.support.thunderbird/KBbdTq2ArjM