Q:

Do you use word wrapping within emails?

I'm wondering if word wrapping should be applied in text emails? And what about HTML emails? If so, what character would you normally wrap at?

A:

RFC 2646 says:

The Text/Plain media type is the lowest common denominator of Internet email, with lines of no more than 997 characters (by convention usually no more than 80)

Another popular standard is to wrap at 72 characters.  This dates back to many console applications (like EDIT and many BBS interfaces) that displayed text within an ASCII "window" including a border and scrollbar, allowing slightly less than 80 characters to be displayed.

A:

It is common to wrap lines at 72 (80 is also common but that means that it will go over 80 when quoted) to handle at least one or two levels of quotation.  There is the "text/flowed" MIME type which means that the client will wrap text itself at window's boundaries but not that many clients support it.  Just setup your editor to wrap at 72 and you will be safe and readable by the most people.
EDIT: the exact type is text/plain with the addition of  format=flowed like this:
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed

See rfc2646 for explanations.
HTML mail should be avoided IMNSHO, not everybody reads mail in a browser or have HTML-enabled mail clients.  Most reasons to use HTML (enriching mail with underline, bold and such) can be emulated.  HTML doesn't need to be wrapped as the client will adapt to the window size.
An alternative to HTML is the "text/enriched" MIME type which gives you most of the advantages of HTML mails w/o the hassle but again, may not be supported everywhere.
See here for text/enriched.

A:

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