Thunderbird 91.1.1 plain-text word wrapping is grossly unsatisfactory

I despair of Thunderbird developers ever getting this right! It used to be okay, in TB 3.x, but somewhere along the way, it went badly awry.

Plain-text messages should never sprawl all the way across the width of the display window. Anything with a line length of more than 72 characters is generally uncomfortable to read; a maximum of 65 characters is, perhaps better, yet TB insists on giving me eye-strain, by refusing to wrap text at a sensible line length.

Prior to the upgrade to TB 91.1.1, I could tweak various “wrap” related settings in the TB “Config Editor”, to override this evil default TB misbehaviour; tonight, after the upgrade to 91.1.1, I sent a message to a project mailing list, and received back a copy which completely ignores my “wrap” setting tweaks, (which do seem to have been preserved through the upgrade); the message has become effectively unreadable.

Short of finding an alternative MUA, which doesn’t exhibit such malign behaviour, or composing properly wrapped — with hard line breaks — messages, in an external editor, can anyone suggest a workaround for this TB misbehaviour?

Well, I think I have found a kludgey work-around … after composing a message, in TB’s composer, if I highlight it all, and press Ctrl-R, it does seem to be reformatted, with proper word wrapping. Far from ideal — I shouldn’t need to resort to such c**p — but at least it does seem to be workable.

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