Alexis,

> I was under the impression that all plain text emails had a max line
> length of 80 is it?
80 includes the ASCII CR and LF characters that terminate the line. So 78 message characters. But that's the original email standard.
In the current standard:
2.1.1.  Line Length Limits
   There are two limits that this specification places on the number of
   characters in a line.  Each line of characters MUST be no more than
   998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding
   the CRLF.
   ...
                             Again, even though this limitation is put
   on messages, it is incumbent upon implementations that display
   messages to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a
   line (certainly at least up to the 998 character limit) for the sake
   of robustness.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322.txt

> As for HTML emails, well I think they are the anti christ and besides,
> any properly formatted HTML email SHOULD have a plain text version as
> well.
Heh, while I've often said something similar, a proposal to display the text/plain part instead of the text/HTML part in a Multipart/Alternative message body would be a separate option (I'd think) from just providing a fixed-pitch font option.

> What I missed out was that all my lists are set to plain text only, so
> html is not an issue....so your suggestion of adding it to a group's
> settings opposed to a user's settings, makes more sense.
No, I specifically did NOT suggest that it be a group setting. Rather a viewing option, more like forward or reverse date order when looking at a list of messages. Something you can change on the spot when you see that a message doesn't look the way you want it to.
Shal
  /"\
  \ /  ASCII Ribbon Campaign
   X   Against HTML Mail
  / \

On Thu, May 10, 2018 at 06:28 pm, Alexis wrote:
If I create this on the website then the 'column' alignment disappears due
to the width of each character. But creating it, like i have now using
thunderbird, set to plain text, is appears fine.
It's not just the width of the characters. By default, browsers collapse
multiple spaces into a single space unless you use the HTML nbsp character.
Throw in proportional fonts and it's rare that things will line up. Overcoming
this will require both bracketing the desired text in <PRE> tags and using a
monospaced font (like Consolas or Courier).
Bruce

Alexis,

> So that is all I am asking, that we have the option to 'add' the <pre>
> tag to all messages we view online
I'd recommend against <pre>, as it has the primary effect of eliminating word-wrap and replacing it with a horizontal scroll (when the source line is too long for the display window).
Rather I'd suggest what you started with: use a fixed pitch font.
I think it makes sense to apply to messages that have only a text/plain message body. I'm not sure if it would be useful or just annoying to apply it as a default font for text/HTML message bodies.
Shal