I had a discussion this morning about the practice of chopping the width of lines in emails to 55 etc chars.

It has never felt right to me. I just went along with it.

For the past year though, I've been alternating.... sometimes full width, sometimes chopped.

So I was curious and tossed questions out.

Because to me, the whole point of doing something like capturing someone's name is to you can customize the email so that they get the sense that you wrote it for THEM.

But intelligent customization in an email dies the instant you fix the character widths to 55 chars. Because it IMMEDIATELY and OBVIOUSLY says "commercial email".

To me, it kills authenticity.

It's completely in-genuine.

I also looked at the only 3 marketers who's emails I do read... 1 alternates like I've been doing, the other 2 go full width.

I then thought of all the cold solicitations that are cleverly semi-customized for me that hit my inbox... if they were chopped lines, I'd immediately think "this was a broadcast, it's a commercial message and this guy put me on a list". But if it's full width, I feel like the email was written to ME.

I decided to completely kill off this 55 character limit nonsense once and for all.

But I asked around first.

Of the responses that came in... one is from a split-testing ninja who has an email spamming background (point is, obviously a very qualified person to give advice on this) ... and the other is Jason Henderson who, I'd rate as the highest or among the highest authorities on all things email marketing. He's a legend on the topic.

Each said "go full width".

I was already "sold" on my theory prior but now I'm definitely sold.

Yet the literature from rehashed and untested teachings (that started back in the mid 90s!!!!) suggest that you should cut your email lines to 55 chars (or the really old school stuff teaches 65 chars... and the REALLY new school for mobile teaches 45 or even 40 chars).

Come to think of it... all JV Notify emails also come as proper full width emails (or at least I'm pretty sure they do).

So this is just some food for thought for other JVNP members... are you chopping the email lines just because "everybody else is doing it"? Or maybe you've ditched (or never even practiced) this arguably bad habit?