How does Outlook identify "Extra Line Breaks"

Question

I am writing a script that emails the output to me, and I read it in Outlook. For some reason Outlook removes all the line breaks in the message, and gives me a little notice that it has removed the extra line breaks from the message

How can I fix my message so that Outlook doesn't remove the line breaks?

• Outlook displays other messages fine (with correct line breaks)
• I have tried all these things with sed - s/$/\r/ s/$/\n/ s/\r\n/\n/ s/\n\r/\n/ s/$/^M/ - with no luck

What does Outlook expect at the end of a line?

Solution

Not sure about what it's looking for, but how about configuring Outlook to not remove them?

Tools -> Options -> Preferences Tab -> click E-mail Options button -> uncheck the box

Another option (albeit not ideal and maybe not even the case for your msgs):

1. Open Outlook.
2. Open the item.
3. Click Format.
4. Click to clear the Unwrap Text check mark.

And here's a post that says that a hack you can use would be to add 2 empty characters to the beginning of each line of text in order to make Outlook not remove the breaks.

Additionally see here for a better layout, add at least 3 spaces at the end of every line (incl. empty lines).

Comments

[yankeemike]

I'm thinking.. shouldn't programming questions be posted in stackoverflow instead?

[phirschybar]

I put it here because I thought it would be more applicable to sysadmins than programmers.

[pauska]

He's asking how Outlook parses the mails, not how he can shut off the behaviour in Outlook.

[squillman]

Yeah, I know. But frequently other suggestions end up working better than the requested functionality. I also posted a hack more toward what he was asking.

[David Mackintosh]

Dude. The problem is "Outlook is misbehaving", not "the message is broken". Fix the Outlook problem.

[David Mackintosh]

See also serverfault.com/questions/26004/…

[pauska]

Ok - you edited and it looks a bit more helpful now, I'm taking my -1 back

[phirschybar]

That hack of adding 2 spaces to the beginning of each line works great! I just did sed "s/^/ /" before the mail command.

[Peter Turner]

I think that's right, I had a similar problem with Pegasus mail. Make sure still generate line breaks because there is a maximum line length at which your line will just be truncated.

[squillman]

@pauska: BTW - Thanks for explaining the downvote earlier! Kinda bugs me when people don't do that...

[Bernhard]

see stackoverflow.com/a/1638608/1498669 and add at least 3 spaces at the end - better for layout :)