How do I format a String in an email so Outlook will print the line breaks?

Question

I'm trying to send an email in Java but when I read the body of the email in Outlook, it's gotten rid of all my linebreaks. I'm putting \n at the ends of the lines but is there something special I need to do other than that? The receivers are always going to be using Outlook.

I found a page on microsoft.com that says there's a 'Remove line breaks' "feature" in Outlook so does this mean there's no solution to get around that other than un-checking that setting?

Thanks

Answer 1

I've just been fighting with this today. Let's call the behavior of removing the extra line breaks "continuation." A little experimenting finds the following behavior:

• Every message starts with continuation off.
• Lines less than 40 characters long do not trigger continuation, but if continuation is on, they will have their line breaks removed.
• Lines 40 characters or longer turn continuation on. It remains on until an event occurs to turn it off.
• Lines that end with a period, question mark, exclamation point or colon turn continuation off. (Outlook assumes it's the end of a sentence?)
• Lines that turn continuation off will start with a line break, but will turn continuation back on if they are longer than 40 characters.
• Lines that start or end with a tab turn continuation off.
• Lines that start with 2 or more spaces turn continuation off.
• Lines that end with 3 or more spaces turn continuation off.

Please note that I tried all of this with Outlook 2007. YMMV.
So if possible, end all bullet items with a sentence-terminating punctuation mark, a tab, or even three spaces.