i'm a avid fan of making the output of my scripts look pretty. so as a result i put in my scripts a lot of lines that are formed by either ****** or =======

now, outlook seems to have a problem with that. it always removes something that it calls "line breakers" from the emails my scripts send out thereby causing the output to look ugly in outlook.

now, how do i fix this? what can add to my script to stop outlook from acting like this?

i already unchecked the "remove line breaker" option in outlook. and it worked, but when someone else replies to email containing the scritp output, its back to being garbled. (since that person hasn't unchecked their "remove line breaker" option. i cant expect everyone in the company to do this which is why i need something to fix my script with)

example of the command i'm running


./report | mail -s "Financial Info" engineeringteam@lob.com, researchteam@lob.com, detailteam@lob.com

any advice on how to edit the above to make the output look better and not get tampered with by outlook?

It's an Outlook issue that can't be controlled completely. There's a knowledge base article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327573/en-us that might help you minimize the chances of it happening. It may have something to do with the length of the lines in the email, i.e. if you can keep the lines less than 65 bytes long, perhaps it would not remove the "extra" line breaks.

If you really want precise control of the email body, you can try doing inline HTML, but that adds complexity and may introduce other unwanted side effects.

Also, "bumping" posts is contrary to the rules of this forum:

(4) Do not 'bump up' questions if they are not answered promptly. No duplicate or cross-posting and do not report a post where your goal is to get an answer more quickly.

Update: Apparently there is a workaround to prevent Outlook from automatically removing "extra" line breaks -- add two spaces to the beginning of each line, and still wrap lines at 65 characters. See this web site for more information.

thanks a million. seems like it worked