Line feed options for sending plain messages

[Lantizia]

Hey,

So 90% of the time I send my messages plain text (so a solution to this problem isn't to just do HTML only, I prefer plain)... but unfortunately an alarming amount of my recipients use Outlook and so they get this stupid message...



Where it perceives 'extra' line breaks, they are actually intentional... and often once Outlook is done with it, the e-mail is barely interpretable.

Whilst obviously this is not a problem with Thunderbird, my hope is through some wonderful customisation in Thunderbird it can present the line feeds in a different way so Outlook doesn't do this.

I've found these things work (and Outlook no longer removes line breaks)...

• Prefixing every line with 2 spaces
• Adding a tab to the end of every line (this is the one I usually do on every line, just before sending - it gets old fast)

I have brought this up before on this forum (with no useful solution) but this time I've got an extra query. I received some spam just now and noticed when I go to 'View Source' that they were using something between the line breaks...

Code: Select all

w of your cam, & its you. =0A=
=0A=
You have got not one but two possibilities. We are going to read up on thes=
e choices in details:=0A=
=0A=
1st option is to skip this email message. In this situation, I am going to =

Any ideas what =0A= is? Because my guess is Outlook treats this differently too.

So the Question is...

Essentially either via about:config, some preference or an extension - is there anyway to customise the way Thunderbird writes/encodes line feeds in the actual source of the message it sends?

Thanks,

Steven

[morat]

Any ideas what =0A= is?

I know the line feed control character has a hex value of 0A. I guess it represents a newline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_character
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline

[tsor]

This is an Outlook display issue. If it not solved at the receivers end with something like this:
You can configure Outlook to never remove such carriage returns by going to Outlook Options, Mail and then unchecking “Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages“

A few workarounds discussed here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/136 ... 08#1638608

Their solutions/discussions at the senders end are:

" 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. "

Hope this give you some ideas. You may search: outlook message cr lf

[Lantizia]

Well I don't mind the solution I'm using now (adding a tab to end of every line, so essentially \t\r\n instead of \r\n as one person in that stackoverflow thread explained it).

But the question was more if anyone knew of a preference of plugin which could rewrite a message I'm about to send to add them in? Perhaps run a regular expression search/replace on any message which is it attempting to send via smtp? I can't find anything like this myself for Thunderbird.