Alex Rivera | Logout

Outlook autocleaning my line breaks and screwing up my email format

Asked 2008-10-29T16:48:26.200
134

I'm sending an email using the dotnet framework. Here is the template that I'm using to create the message:

Date of Hire: %HireDate%
Annual Salary: %AnnualIncome%
Reason for Request: %ReasonForRequest%

Name of Voluntary Employee: %FirstName% %LastName%
Total Coverage Applied For:  %EECoverageAmount%
Guaranteed Coverage Portion: %GICoveragePortion%
Amount Subject to Medical Evident: %GIOverage%

When the messages is received in outlook, outlook tells me "Extra line breaks in this message were removed". And the message displays like this:

Date of Hire: 9/28/2001
Annual Salary: $100,000
Reason for Request: New Hire

Name of Voluntary Employee: Ronald Weasley Total Coverage Applied For:  $500,000 Guaranteed Coverage Portion: $300,000.00 Amount Subject to Medical Evident: $200,000

Note how Outlook incorrectly removes needed line breaks after the name, EECoverageAmount, etc...

It's important for the email recepients to get a correctly formatted email, and I have to assume that some of them use outlook 2003. I also can't assume they will know enough to shutoff the autoclean feature to get the message to format properly.

I have viewed these messages in other mail clients and they display correctly

some more information:

  • I am using UTF-8 BodyEncoding (msg.BodyEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8)
  • The msg.Body is being read from a UTF-8 encoded text file, and each line is terminated with a crlf.

Question: How do I change the format of the message to avoid this problem?

.net utf-8 outlook smtp
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2 Answers

103

Start every line with 2 spaces and outlook will be "tricked" into keeping your formatting.

So change

Date of Hire: %HireDate%
Annual Salary: %AnnualIncome%
Reason for Request: %ReasonForRequest%

Name of Voluntary Employee: %FirstName% %LastName%
Total Coverage Applied For:  %EECoverageAmount%
Guaranteed Coverage Portion: %GICoveragePortion%
Amount Subject to Medical Evident: %GIOverage%

to

  Date of Hire: %HireDate%
  Annual Salary: %AnnualIncome%
  Reason for Request: %ReasonForRequest%

  Name of Voluntary Employee: %FirstName% %LastName%
  Total Coverage Applied For:  %EECoverageAmount%
  Guaranteed Coverage Portion: %GICoveragePortion%
  Amount Subject to Medical Evident: %GIOverage%
^^ <--- Two extra spaces at the start of every line

Here is the article I found when researching this problem which goes into a little more depth than my answer.

answered 2008-10-29T18:43:21.523
-6

Change your line termination from crlf to either cr or lf.

I suspect that the top of the email uses only cr (or lf), and Outlook expects the rest of the email to follow the same format.

answered 2008-10-29T17:22:04.930

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