Line wrapping does not appear as expected when you send e-mail messages in Outlook 2003

When you send or receive an e-mail message in Outlook 2003, the line wrapping in the e-mail message does not appear as expected.

This problem occurs if you send or receive a plain text e-mail message in Outlook 2003 by using an Internet e-mail account. In this situation, the text is always hard-wrapped to a length between 30 and 132 characters.

To resolve this problem, follow these steps.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

1. Start Registry Editor. To do so, click Start, click Run, type regedt32.exe in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. Locate, and then click the following registry key :
   
   HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
3. In the right-pane, double-click the WrapLinesDWORD value.
4. Note the value that appears in the Value Data box.
   • If the WrapLines value is set to a non-zero value or is not present (the default setting), plain text lines are wrapped before the e-mail message is encoded. In this situation, you must create the WrapLines value. To do so, follow these steps:
     1. Locate, and then click the following registry key:
        
        HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
     2. On the Edit menu, click Add Value.
     3. In the Value Name box, type WrapLines.
     4. Click REG_DWORD in the Data Type drop-down list, and then click OK.
     5. In the Data box, type 0, and then click OK.
   • If the WrapLines value is set to 0, no line-wrapping is performed before the e-mail message is encoded.

When you create the WrapLines value and set it to 0, you prevent lines from being wrapped with hard line-breaks. If the encoding option information in the “More Information" section of this article uses the default setting of 0, the e-mail message is sent as Quoted-Printable encoding with all lines soft-wrapped correctly. Use the information in the "More Information" section of this article for additional troubleshooting information.

After the e-mail message body is wrapped, the e-mail message is encoded for transmission by using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). The encoding method is specified by the InternetMailTextEncodingDWORD value in the following registry key:

HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

You can set the InternetMailTextEncodingDWORD value to any of the following values:

0 - Autodetect (the default setting). This value checks both the percentage of characters that are not US-ASCII and the length of the longest line to determine the correct encoding. If lines have been wrapped and all characters are US-ASCII, the e-mail message will be sent as 7-bit. The e-mail message will be sent as Quoted-Printable if lines were not wrapped, or if more than 0 percent, but less than 17 percent, of the characters are not US-ASCII. If more than 17 percent of the characters are not US-ASCII, the e-mail message will be base64 encoded.

1 - Quoted-Printable. The e-mail message will be in quoted printable encoding.

2 - Base64. The e-mail message will be base64 encoded.

3 - 8-bit. No encoding will be used. The e-mail message will be sent as it is.

Note These values apply both to plain text e-mail messages and to the plain text portion of an HTML e-mail message.

If the WrapLines registry value is set so that the lines are wrapped, the length of the line can be set by editing the PlainWrapLenDWORD value in the following registry key:

HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings

In Outlook 2003, you can only set the line length to use a value that is between 30 and 132 characters. When you configure the PlainWrapLen value by editing the registry, you can set the line length to use a value of up to 998 characters.