Today I was working on an ASP.NET application that sends out plain-text emails to site administrators when certain conditions unfold. One problem I unearthed today is that when viewing these emails in Microsoft Outlook many of the carriage returns were being removed, making the email difficult to read. The code to generate the body of these emails is very simple and straightforward, looking something like:
StringBuilder body = new StringBuilder();
body.Append("Information of interest:").Append(Environment.NewLine);
body.AppendFormat("Item #1: {0}", someValue).Append(Environment.NewLine);
body.AppendFormat("Item #2: {0}", someOtherValue).Append(Environment.NewLine);
body.AppendFormat("Item #3: {0}", yetAnotherValue).Append(Environment.NewLine);
...
When viewing the message in Outlook it would come out like so:
Information of interest:
Item #1: blah Item #2: blah blah Item #3: blah blah blah
Note how the carriage returns between each of the three items has been removed. Boo. The behavior is not due to the code that generates the email, but rather how Outlook displays a message. (For instance, GMail displays the carriage returns as you'd expect.) Outlook strips out what it identifies an unnecessary carriage returns. If you open the email in Outlook you'll see a little informational bar at the top of the email explaining that Outlook has removed extra line breaks and that you can click it to add them back in. Furthermore, you can configure Outlook to never remove such carriage returns by going to Tools --> Options, clicking the E-mail Options button, and then unchecking “Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages.“
Of course, it's never a good strategy to tell you customers that the problem is on their end and that they need to do something to fix the problem. The good news is that there appears to be a way that you can format the line breaks so that Outlook won't automatically remove them. I got this tip from member scarecrow-rye at the ASP.NET Forums, in the post Email text message line breaks not working:
Try including an empty space character at the end of each line. Certainlty seems to work for me.
And it worked for me, too. With this little adjustment to the code, Outlook stopped stripping out what it had earlier deemed as extra line breaks:
StringBuilder body = new StringBuilder();
body.Append("Information of interest:").Append(Environment.NewLine);
body.AppendFormat("Item #1: {0} ", someValue).Append(Environment.NewLine);
body.AppendFormat("Item #2: {0} ", someOtherValue).Append(Environment.NewLine);
body.AppendFormat("Item #3: {0} ", yetAnotherValue).Append(Environment.NewLine);
...
Note the extra space between the value and the end of the string.