When a user sends a message to our community via email, using Outlook, unwanted line feeds are being inserted. For example, the user sends: The Fair Defense Act requires atto= rneys seeking appointments for juvenile delinquency cases to have averaged = twelve (12) hours a year of continuing legal education courses or other training relating specifically to juvenile law. Thi= s seminar will satisfy the required annual 12 hours of CLE if you do not al= ready have them. and Discourse inserts a between education and courses. Or the user sends: If you are a member of TCDLA, you can register here: Click here to register on TCDLA and Discourse inserts a between you and are When I send the same message from Fastmail, I don’t get the same result. So I’m willing to blame this on Outlook, but before I do, is this a Discourse bug?

Your examples show the text as being on separate lines, I’d expect it to insert a there?

Yes, it appears that Outlook is putting in a line break that an HTML browser doesn’t interpret as a line break (so that if you send or receive the email there is no line break there) but Discourse does.

[image] Mark_W_Bennett: unwanted line feeds are being inserted. It looks like more than that alone is happening. I assume the "3D"s are hex for the equal sign, which would be redundant and AFAIK likely cause breakage. And the single quotation marks around the font family are entities instead of single quotes. Then there is an empty namespaced p element which I’m guessing is for the default spacing instead of using CSS to create spacing. etc. Maybe the Outlook email client knows how to deal with that mess, but I don’t think it should be expected that anything else would be able to.

Would you know the exact version of outlook (and platform) that is mangling our emails? When we send mail out we are super careful to have valid HTML.

I read it as relating to inbound email, Discourse interpreting the CRLF which Outlook adds to HTML emails as HTML ignores line breaks and interprets all text between tags as contiguous. It appears that there’s some kind of plaintext-to-html happening before the HTML is rendered out.

@Mark_W_Bennett can you ask your user to check the following setting: File > Options > Advanced International Options > Preferred Encoding for Outgoing Messages Is it set to Unicode (UTF-8)? If not can you ask them to change it to UTF-8 and re-test? Outlook may need to be restarted after they change that setting.

@Mark_W_Bennett Have you tried enabling the “traditional markdown linebreaks” site setting? That might help. @Stephen How is encoding related to the issue discussed here?

@zogstrip I have not, but I will.

Discourse inserting Unwanted <br>

Product Support

Mark_W_Bennett (Mark W. Bennett) April 2, 2019, 1:26pm 10

The user reports that it is set to UTF-8.

Topic		Replies	Views
Line breaks when replying via email Product Support	7	1641	June 5, 2019
Email reply formatting Product Support email	17	561	July 8, 2025
"Broken" quoting of/into email Feature	17	1916	July 18, 2017
Thunderbird and ML mode - peculiar indentation Product Support	6	1110	April 29, 2020
Change <br> into \r\n in incoming emails Product Support	0	326	July 14, 2022

Discourse inserting Unwanted <br>

Related topics