Question: length of lines imported

I have a question, not so much of an issue. I am hoping that I'm posting this in the right place. I have been successful at receiving and posting via mailhandler emails but when they are fetched from the pop3 mailbox they are then brought into drupal and what appears is a good post, but when I go into drupal to edit the message, I notice it seems that each line has been added as though returns are being inserted at the end of each line. Is this correct? are return characters being added for each line? What I notice is that the lines come in something like this in the editor:

first line is ok but then theres the fact that it doesn't go
all fo the way
so the second line is then appearing next with the same
cut off or what
appears to be a cutoff. I can then edited the line and
remove these
extra line endings but the truth is that I would think that
the body of the
email which was continueous to start with should still be
continuous in
the body of the drupal post or am I just not reading that
right?

So is there any way to control this? I use outlook to send the text only messages because I use VBA to create the messages to start with. Where can I find documentation on this particular subject? I am not proficient enough yet to go in and read the php code directly.

Michael