If you use Enter key to type individual lines of text in a plain text message or plain text signature in Sigsync Email signatures for Office 365, the email/signature may appear as one long line on the recipient's email client. Such scenarios arise in case the recipient has enabled the Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages option on their email client. To resolve this problem ask your recipient to follow the steps below.

1. In Outlook desktop, go to File > Options.
2. Click on Mail, scroll down and go to Message format. Disable the option Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages if you'd like to prevent line breaks from being removed from emails/signature and click on OK.

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That’s all fine and dandy for you, but what about your colleagues? Getting them all to do this would be a pain. Well, Outlook has this curious idea that lines ending with three or more spaces should not have this helpful behaviour applied to them. Thus, the easy solution to the problem is to add three spaces at the end of every. single. line.

It’s not as hard as it may sound. awk will do it for us.

awk '{ print $0" " }'

This reads every single line, and re-prints it with three spaces at the end. Outlook is now happy.

You can easily pipe stuff into it for your crontab entries. The below is a useless example:

find /etc -name "*.conf" | awk '{ print $0" " }'

You can also make your script print like this internally, which in Bash is done by redirecting stdout and stderr through an awk process, as such:

#!/usr/bin/env bash exec > >[awk '{ print $0" " }'] 2>&1 echo "This goes to stdout" echo "This goes to stderr" >&2 echo "More stdout" After the exec line, anything printed by your script will be sent through awk and on through stdout. Outlook will no longer try to help.

But when received and viewed by recipients, the carriage returns are removed, making the email signature difficult to read.

The plain text example is very simple and straightforward:

This is the first line. Line

2: blah

Line

3: blah blah

Line

3: blah blah blah

When viewing the message in the Outlook inbox, it would come out like so:

This is the first line. Line

2: blah Line

3: blah blah Line

3: blah blah blah

Note how the carriage returns between each of the lines has been removed.

The behavior is not due to the code that generates the email, but rather how Outlook displays a message. [For instance, Gmail shows the carriage returns as you'd expect.] Outlook strips out what it identifies an unnecessary carriage return.

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:

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.“

In Microsoft Outlook, you create a new plain text formatted post containing line breaks. Outlook removes the line breaks and displays the message. However, the posts do not display any indication that this has occurred, other than the change in formatting. The information bar message about extra line breaks does not appear, either in the Preview pane or when you read the post. This processing appears to happen when the message is initially posted.

Note E-mail message items display the information bar as expected when the line breaks are removed.

Cause

By default, the Auto Remove Line Breaks feature in Outlook is enabled. This causes the line breaks to be removed. Any two or more successive line breaks are not removed.

Workaround

Use one of the following methods to work around this behavior.

Note If you edit the existing post and you save the changes before you use one of the following methods, the line breaks are lost and can only be replaced manually.

Method 1. Disable the feature that removes extra line breaks

This method disables the feature for all plain text items. To do this, follow these steps:

For Outlook 2010 and later versions:

1. Open Outlook.
2. On the File tab, click Options.
3. In the Options dialog, click Mail.
4. In the Message format section, clear the Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages check box.
5. Click OK.

For Outlook 2007 or earlier versions:

1. Open Outlook.
2. On the Tools menu, click Options.
3. On the Preferences tab, click the E-mail Options button.
4. Click to clear the Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages check box.
5. Click OK two times.

Method 2. Use HTML or Rich Text format

You can use HTML or Rich Text formats when you create new items. Or you can change existing posts to these formats.

New posts

You can change the format for individual messages, or for all messages. To change the format for all messages, follow these steps:

For Outlook 2010 and later versions:

1. Open Outlook.
2. On the File tab, click Options.
3. In the Options dialog, click Mail.
4. In the Compose messages section, click either HTML or Rich Text in the Compose messages in this format drop-down list.
5. Click OK.

For Outlook 2007 or earlier versions:

1. Open Outlook.
2. On the Tools menu, click Options.
3. Click the Mail Format tab.
4. Click either HTML or Rich Text in the Message Format section.
5. Click OK.

When you create a post item you can change the format for an individual message. To do this, follow these steps:

For Outlook 2010 and later versions:

1. Open Outlook.
2. On the Home tab, click New Items, and under More Items click Post in This Folder.
3. On the Format Text tab, click As HTML or click As Rich Text in the Format section.

For Outlook 2007 or earlier versions:

1. Open Outlook.
2. On the File menu, click New, and then click Post in This Folder.
3. In Outlook 2007, click HTML or click Rich Text on the Options tab in the Format group. In Outlook 2003, or Outlook 2002, click Plain Text, and then click HTML or Rich Text.

Existing posts

• In Outlook 2007, click Other Actions after you open the post item on the Discussion tab in the Actions group. Then, click Revise Contents before you change the format.
• In Outlook 2003, or Outlook 2002, open the post item, click Edit, and then click Revise Contents before you change the format.

Method 3. Restore the line breaks in Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2002

This method allows you to restore the line breaks that were removed. To do this, follow these steps:

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

Note This option is not available in Outlook 2010 or Outlook 2007.

Status

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

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