How do I format a String in an email so Outlook will print the line breaks?

Question

I'm trying to send an email in Java but when I read the body of the email in Outlook, it's gotten rid of all my linebreaks. I'm putting \n at the ends of the lines but is there something special I need to do other than that? The receivers are always going to be using Outlook.

I found a page on microsoft.com that says there's a 'Remove line breaks' "feature" in Outlook so does this mean there's no solution to get around that other than un-checking that setting?

Thanks

Answer 1

Try \r\c instead of \n.

EDIT: I think @Robert Wilkinson had it right. \r\n. Memory just isn't what it used to be.

Answer 2

You need to use \r\n

Answer 3

The \n largely works for us, but Outlook does sometimes take it upon itself to remove the line breaks as you say.

Answer 4

You need to send HTML emails. With <br />s in the email, you will always have your line breaks.

Answer 5

You need to set the content-type to "Content-type: text/html". Then use <br> tags. By default it is "text/plain", thus causing your <br> tags to read as text instead of being parsed as html.

Answer 6

Microsoft Outlook 2002 and above removes "extra line breaks" from text messages by default (kb308319). That is, Outlook seems to simply ignore line feed and/or carriage return sequences in text messages, running all of the lines together.

This can cause problems if you're trying to write code that will automatically generate an email message to be read by someone using Outlook.

For example, suppose you want to supply separate pieces of information each on separate lines for clarity, like this:

Transaction needs attention!

PostedDate: 1/30/2009

Amount: $12,222.06

TransID: 8gk288g229g2kg89

PostalCode: 91543

Your Outlook recipient will see the information all smashed together, as follows:

Transaction needs attention! PostedDate: 1/30/2009 Amount: $12,222.06 TransID: 8gk288g229g2kg89 ZipCode: 91543

There doesn't seem to be an easy solution. Alternatives are:

1. You can supply two sets of line breaks between each line. That does stop Outlook from combining the lines onto one line, but it then displays an extra blank line between each line (creating the opposite problem). By "supply two sets of line breaks" I mean you should use "\r\n\r\n" or "\r\r" or "\n\n" but not "\r\n" or "\n\r".
2. You can supply two spaces at the beginning of every line in the body of your email message. That avoids introducing an extra blank line between each line. But this works best if each line in your message is fairly short, because the user may be previewing the text in a very narrow Outlook window that wraps the end of each line around to the first position on the next line, where it won't line up with your two-space-indented lines. This strategy has been used for some newsletters.
3. You can give up on using a plain text format, and use an html format.

Answer 7

I've just been fighting with this today. Let's call the behavior of removing the extra line breaks "continuation." A little experimenting finds the following behavior:

Every message starts with continuation off.
Lines less than 40 characters long do not trigger continuation, but if continuation is on, they will have their line breaks removed.
Lines 40 characters or longer turn continuation on. It remains on until an event occurs to turn it off.
Lines that end with a period, question mark, exclamation point or colon turn continuation off. (Outlook assumes it's the end of a sentence?)
Lines that turn continuation off will start with a line break, but will turn continuation back on if they are longer than 40 characters.
Lines that start or end with a tab turn continuation off.
Lines that start with 2 or more spaces turn continuation off.
Lines that end with 3 or more spaces turn continuation off.

Please note that I tried all of this with Outlook 2007. YMMV.
So if possible, you can end messages with a sentence-terminating punctuation mark, or even a tab.

Answer 8

try this:

message.setContent(new String(body.getBytes(), "iso-8859-1"), "text/html; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"");

Regards, Mohammad Rasool Javeed