Visual line mode in email citation

[Uday S Reddy]

Getting email messages with long lines is a pretty common thing.  Both VM and 
Gnus (as far as I can tell) have traditionally used the longlines package to 
handle such long lines.

Citing messages in replies is a big deal (with "> " or other citation prefixes).  When a 
message is cited, Gnus and VM take the text that is already filled with longlines, and insert it in the 
reply, in effect converting the soft line breaks to hard line breaks.  Then they add the "> 
" prefix to each line.  This works surprisingly well.  (VM isn't doing this correctly at the moment, 
but I am in the process of fixing it.)

Trying to use the visual line mode in place of longlines isn't working very 
well.  There are no soft line breaks.   So, we end up citing the entire 
paragraph as a single line.  This is supposed to be ok.  Mail clients like 
Thunderbird know that the entire paragraph is being cited and put citation 
marks on all of it when they do word wrapping.

> But, VM and Gnus, depending on Emacs visual-line-mode, have no idea of what is 
> going
on.  They end up putting the citation prefix on the first line of the 
paragraph, and
the remaining lines remain uncited.  Like this paragraph, for example.

Can the visual line mode be taught some email citation issues?

Cheers,
Uday