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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?

Brent
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1 Answers1

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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).

Bernhard
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squillman
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    He's asking how Outlook parses the mails, not how he can shut off the behaviour in Outlook. – pauska Jun 15 '09 at 18:03
  • 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. – squillman Jun 15 '09 at 18:08
  • Dude. The problem is "Outlook is misbehaving", not "the message is broken". Fix the Outlook problem. – David Mackintosh Jun 15 '09 at 18:15
  • See also http://serverfault.com/questions/26004/getting-correct-linefeeds-in-emails-generated-from-linux – David Mackintosh Jun 15 '09 at 18:18
  • Ok - you edited and it looks a bit more helpful now, I'm taking my -1 back – pauska Jun 15 '09 at 18:19
  • That hack of adding 2 spaces to the beginning of each line works great! I just did sed "s/^/ /" before the mail command. – Brent Jun 15 '09 at 18:35
  • 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. – Peter Turner Jun 15 '09 at 18:38
  • @pauska: BTW - Thanks for explaining the downvote earlier! Kinda bugs me when people don't do that... – squillman Jun 15 '09 at 19:11
  • see https://stackoverflow.com/a/1638608/1498669 and add at least 3 spaces at the end - better for layout :) – Bernhard Jan 20 '21 at 10:12