Woody's ASCII Formatting Secrets (Outlook 2002 on Windows 98 SE)

[rtimai]

Almost all of my plain-text newsletters now appear in Outlook 2002 with the legend "Extra line breaks in this message were removed. To restore, click here." Different newsletters have different patterns of lines run together, and clicking on the legend restores them to their original format, as sent. (Upon which the legend changes to, "This message has extra line breaks. To remove, click here."

Woody's plain-text letters may be the ONLY newletters that do not arrive wrapped to screen (which generally has a worsened effect on readability,) with the option to "restore extra line breaks." I'd like to send some useful feedback to all the other newsletter publishers about their symptoms, but I don't have a clue about why only Woody seems to have gotten it right. Could someone here, or Woody himself, publish some tips about formatting ASCII newsletters for Outlook 2002?

Also, would mailing a copy to myself make a valid test for my own messages, or do messages have to be received on a different mail server, other than my own? Or, could I send to my Yahoo mailbox, which is auto-forwarded to my EarthLink mailbox -- would that test my formatting?

Thanks!

Roger

[MaryJ]

if you are sending newsletters, there is a secret to forcing hte lines not to wrap and i used to know it - but i also think it had a few bugs. <img src=/S/grin.gif border=0 alt=grin width=15 height=15>

it had to do with spaces before the CR but that's all i remember.

you know, you can turn that feature off? see the tools > options menu, email options button

[rtimai]

Thanks, MJ, that's a valuable clue that bears investigation. I've learned that different mail servers perform formatting operations differently, which also probably affects line-wrap conditions. And newsletters that are composed in a single session may have different characteristics from those that are compiled by cut-paste work. These latter seem to show the most inconsistencies.

Whatever Woody's editors are doing, they seem to have gotten it right. Even NYT and Forbes have problems.

Roger