Text wrapping?

[treasure.mountain]

I'd appreciate it if someone could explain email text wrapping to me.

I recently started using a canned reply.  Apparently the auto-wrap at
72 characters setting that works for individually composed messages
doesn't work here, since I got a complain that the paragraphs were all
one one line. I've fixed that by putting in hard returns manually, but
it makes me wonder why email is set up this way.

Why do I even want the option of sending messages with unwrapped lines?
Are there some systems that work better with messages sent in that
format?

Anyway, if anyone could offer a primer on why email has these two
varieties, I'd appreciate the information.

Thanks in advance.

Pat Adkins