How to stop Outlook hiding line breaks
One of my most hated things from recent versions of Outlook is the way it edits plain text messages by chopping out supposedly extra line breaks. Inevitably, they’re not extra — they’re there because the sender doesn’t like hitting enter twice between paragraphs — particularly when writing short lists of things.
Outlook does give you the option of restoring the linebreaks it’s taken away by clicking an option near the top of the message. It’s a right pain to have to keep doing it on every message though.
In Outlook XP, I never found a way to turn this off. Maybe it was there, but very well hidden.
Fortunately in Outlook 2003 it’s possible to turn it off for good, though the online help is no help at all at finding it.
Here’s how you do it: Tools / Options / Preferences tab / E-Mail section / click E-mail options. Then find and turn off the checkbox “Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages”.
(Note that after turning it permanently off, it still happens if you’ve been mucking about in a message beforehand, shown the “extra” linebreaks, then hidden them again and saved the message.)
December 6th, 2005 at 10:52
Thanks for your help!
January 5th, 2006 at 11:08
Is there anyway to send a header with the email that will disable the outlook feature for that message?
Steve
August 29th, 2006 at 16:23
I hear you can have this “disabled” by the email you send, simply by inserting two extra spaces at the beginning of every line, which an editor like ultra-edit can do for you through the margin settings in the paragraph formatting options or something like that.
July 31st, 2007 at 09:19
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
September 12th, 2007 at 14:25
Removing the line break issue in Oultlook issue is solve by this thread,,, well done much
appreciated