Word Wrapping Email Text for Webmail Applications

Email comes in all shapes and sizes, from complicated nested multi-part structures to simple text bodies. But even messages comprised of just plain text require special preparation to safely and properly display from within a webmail application. For security purposes any HTML within a text message needs to be converted to appropriate entities. Using the CSS "white-space: pre;" setting is effective as well, the CSS equivalent of

 tags, but this makes word wrapping the message in such a way as to ensure that the webmail interface remains consistent very tricky. Neither approach is ideal (entities vs pre-formatted), and both suffer from some similar display problems. For example a line containing 200 characters in a row with no spaces, such as a long URL will either spill out from it's containing div or expand the width of the page to force a horizontal scroll bar (yuck). To further complicate the situation  we need to be able to create links to both urls and email addresses within the text as well as highlight reply quoted sections, not to mention take into account converting the original character set to UTF-8 for display in the page. For Hastymail 2 I have been working on a new system that preps the text body in such a way as to address all of these concerns and creates a situation in which the text is wrapped by the browser automatically for almost any practical resolution without spilling out of its container and without horizontal scroll bars, and without a user setting that defines the maximum line length, all the while maintaining the intended format of the original message as closely as possible within the constraints of the presentation medium.