How does Outlook determine if there are extra line breaks?

Question

Outlook 2010 (32-bit) / Windows 7

I have a scenario where a plain-text email message is being interpreted incorrectly by Outlook and formatted strangely.

On all other email clients, the message looks like this:

--------------------------
Foo Title:
--------------------------
Foo 1 #: 123456789
Foo 2 ID: ref:_123456._789101112wD:ref
Foo Date: 1/11/2014
Foo Category: Blah
Foo Category 2: Blah 2
Foo Summary: Blah
--------------------------

For some reason though, Outlook 2010 on my system states ("Extra line breaks in this message were removed" and displays the message body like:

--------------------------
Foo Title:
--------------------------
Foo 1 #: 123456789
Foo 2 ID: ref:_123456._789101112wD:ref Foo Date: 1/11/2014
Foo Category: Blah
Foo Category 2: Blah 2
Foo Summary: Blah
--------------------------

This is all plain-text - no HTML formatting so I'm not sure how/where Outlook is thinking that there's an extra line break. Can someone elaborate on what's going on here? How does Outlook determine that there are extra line breaks?

I know I can change my Outlook preferences but I'd prefer to figure out what's happening here since this email will go to other folks too.

Solution

"Can someone elaborate on what's going on here? How does Outlook determine that there are extra line breaks?"

By default, the Auto Remove Line Breaks feature in Outlook is enabled. This causes the line breaks to be removed. Any two or more successive line breaks are not removed.

Source: Line breaks are removed in posts made in plain text format in Outlook

I've run into this myself in the past as well. The "fix" I used was to change the source email (mine were generated by a utility I wrote) and indent each line with a couple spaces, and magically Outlook would stop trying to unwrap them.

According to this blog, and this thread you may also be able to prevent the unwrap by appending a single extra space on the END of each line as well/instead. :)

Comments

[Wutnaut]

I don't know what's going on, but I think it may be important to note that the line that messed up line breaks had 3 colons in it. This may be your problem.

[Jeremy Yip]

With Outlook 2010 I need no less than 3 trailing spaces to workaround extra line break detection. This workaround is welcome as I can't expect every email recipient to change their Outlook settings.