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I find that when I paste excerpts from my text editor (width 100) into the thunderbird compose window it is truncated to width 80 or so by the time it gets to the receiver. Within the compose window itself, there is no truncation. I can verify this by sending the Email to myself. I am not sure if these extra end of line characters/formats are inserted before sending or on receiving. Is there a way to tweak this behaviour so that the width of my Emails are always 100?

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You can change the number of characters per line by changing the prefs value mailnews.wraplength. By default it contains the value 72. Change it to 100 and plain E-Mail messages in the composer will be wrapped at column 100.

See also Thunderbird Mail and news settings and Modify Thunderbird settings.

The Config editor can be opened via: Tools → Options → Advanced → General → Config Editor

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Thanks for the link, though it seems to apply to an older version of Thunderbird. 8.0 version doesn't have tools->options menu and I can find no reference to a config editor for this version. –  SetJmp Jan 13 '12 at 16:40
@SetJmp see my updated answer –  Robert Jan 13 '12 at 19:22
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