Anyone know the secred magic incantation is get Evolution to either stop doing line wrap while composing email, or at least extend the line size?

It's very annoying that the developers only want bug reports filed. This isn't a bug. It's a misfeature. I would agree that the default should be the legacy setting. But there should be a means to change it as desired. Even my ancient command line mail programs all let me do lines as long as I wanted. But I do not file bug reports on things that developers merely decide on. There needs to be a discussion, and it seems the developers are closed off to discussion. I guess it's time to have a look at Mozilla or another mail agent.

I stopped using evolution a long time ago. And not because of the word wrap.
It takes too long to start up, it breaks frequently and it doesn't do what it should do - act as a communications centre.

On my old machine I use Balsa - now that's basic and old, but at least it acts as a mail client, instead of an Outlook clone.
I never used outlook on windows, why should I want it on linux ?

The whole point of *nix IMHO is to have lots of independant programs that can all talk to each other. Having one big mess of programming goes against the grain.

As long as the programs play well with each other, I'd agree. Been too many around that don't. Others do but require too much configuration to make them do that (their defaults don't play well with each other).

But it is a GUI/HTML/XML world and communicating with a lot of other people requires things that are "just not unix natural". I need the ability to send mail in HTML (without giving up the per message choice of plain old ASCII text), attach anything with MIME, manage folders on an IMAP server, etc. Still, I emailed a network diagram to someone a couple days ago ... as an ASCII drawing :-)

lol, good.

IMHO, it's good to keep in practice.
The end of the world is nigh ...

(and all that shi*)

You can select the "Preformatted" option for Paragraph Style.

Or, if you want the effect of line wrapping to occur according to the dimensions of your open window while composing emails then switch to HTML format (this will actually still leave your lines physically unbroken when read by other people and it will be up to them to control their own window geometry (like using MS Windows' Notepad)).

During HTML formatting, for parts where you want unwrapped plain text eg. when importing log files etc, you can highlight the required text and click on the "Plain Text" icon (the icon that looks like a terminal icon 3 rows beneath your "Subject:" field); or use the "Preformatted" option.

I was not aware of that option, or the purpose of it... Thanks a lot. It really helped me :-D