Thanks, Gary, for your response. It made me realise something, namely that Mutt itself seems broken wrt format=flowed. I'll turn to the mutt-users list for that.

However, I did have one comment relating to Vim:

Neither Vim nor mutt should do anything to messages to corrupt their contents. In particular, neither should automatically remove any leading spaces. See RFC 3676.

I am 100% with you on that. However, with Vim being the composer of a message, I'd argue that there is no corruption of contents going on, if it differentiates between displaying spaces, and saving them to the file:

Let me elaborate, using · for spaces and $ for EOL:

Take the following paragraph.

 | 1. This is a multiline |
 |    indented paragraph  |

If &formatoptions doesn't include "aw", then we need those leading spaces explicitly, because the indenting is done in such a way as to hard-code it into the file. Therefore, Vim should save:

 | 1. This is … a multiline$ |
 | ···indented paragraph.$   |

However, if &fo=aw as well as &fo=n is in place, and there is a trailing space on the first line, then I would say Vim should really not be saving those spaces. Instead, the buffer should really be

 | 1. This is … a multiline$ |
 | indented paragraph.$      |

But this then gets displayed as in the original example, i.e. Vim displays leading spaces, recognizing the numbered list.

Or at least this should/could be configurable. Don't you agree?

If some receiving agent claims to support format=flowed, yet blindly includes sequences of spaces in the middle of flowed lines, as in your third example, I would say that agent is broken.

Oh great. Yeah, I'll let the GMail admins know at [email protected].

Also, your second example suggests that mutt is using quoted-printable encoding. RFC 3676 says that quoted-printable encoding "SHOULD NOT be used for Format=Flowed unless absolutely necessary...."

Unfortunately, PGP/MIME needs quoted-printable (mutt's pgp_strict_enc), and so one could argue it is "absolutely necessary".

I don't quite understand the ramifications of this though.

Best, and thanks again!

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