Outlook 2003: Outlook wraps plain text before sending

[Marc Kupper]

It's unrelated to my previous post about "Wrapping of plain text
messages fails when set to 40 or higher" but the whole reason I took
a hard look at the Outlook wrapping was because I had mailed someone
some data that was a series of short lines and Outlook sent the thing
as a single line. A poem would be an example of something that should
be sent as a series of short lines.

It turns out that Outlook 2003 (version 11.6359.6408 SP1) has logic
that looks at a message and if consecutive lines of text appear to be
part of a single sentence that Outlook will join the lines together
before writing the message to the Outbox folder.

For example - if I send myself the "In a Station of the Metro"
haiku
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(Lustra, 1917, USA)

And then look in my Sent Mail folder I will see
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black
bough.
(Lustra, 1917, USA)

I tried to force the haiku onto two lines by prefixing the lines with
"|" ">" and "." and for all of them Outlook wrapped it onto
a single line. For example:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black
bough.
(Lustra, 1917, USA)

This is a huge pain for me and the only way to disable this function
seems to be to end each line with a period. For example
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;.
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(Lustra, 1917, USA).

Is there an option to disable this "smart wrapping?" I want my
plain text e-mails to be delivered exactly as I wrote them. I found
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=823921 but the WrapLines setting
controls wrapping as Outlook is taking the message from the Outbox and
delivering it.

Incidentally - Besides joining lines of text together it turns out
that when text is prefixed with something like ">" that this
"smart wrapping" is also wrapping text at 72 characters. This is
entirely unrelated to the PlainWrapLen setting.

I have no idea if "smart wrapping" is the correct name for this
function but is there a way to control it? In a way, it's pretty
cool as it allows Outlook users to participate on mailing lists that
use things like > prefixing and their text will always be well
formatted until they have a need to send lines of text "as is"
whether it be a code example, poem, or in my case I was trying to send
someone a table of contents.

TIA,
Marc

 

[Brian Tillman]

that looks at a message and if consecutive lines of text appear to be
part of a single sentence that Outlook will join the lines together
before writing the message to the Outbox folder.

For example - if I send myself the "In a Station of the Metro"
haiku
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(Lustra, 1917, USA)

I just did this same test, using your haiku and exactly the same Outlook
2003 you're using. I sent it to another Outlook and a non-windows mail
client. The haiku came through exactly as sent, wrapped exactly as you show
it above. I have my message format set to plain text. Outlook actually
sent plain text, but quoted-printable encoded (which I'd love to stop; even
the InternetMailTextEncoding registry setting described in the article you
cited in your other thread did not prevent that). The non-Windows mail
client does automatically decode quoted-printable plain text. My line
wrapping was set to 76 and I did not have either of the other two registry
values cited in the article. My Internet Format has "Convert to Plain Text"
for the Rich Text format option, but that shouldn't be a factor, since I
didn't send a Rich Text message.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

The logic should only apply in Outlook 2003 - if the recipient uses another
client it should be as expected. They can control the line breaks - tools
options, email options... remove extra line breaks.

also - see if switching to always using WE (ISO) helps - mail format tab,
international button. Default is autoselect. If you are using WE(ISO) try
autoselect or us ascii.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Join OneNote Tips mailing list: http://www.onenote-tips.net/

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Are you sending through Exchange? Using WE(ISO) instead of autoselect uses
QP (It might always use QP but breaks lines- i need unbroken lines and
choosing WE(ISO) works for me.)

if you use a non-exchange SMTP, don't use any of the reg keys (from 823921),
and possibly if you select USASCII it should not use QP. if you need QP,
you need to use the reg keys.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Join OneNote Tips mailing list: http://www.onenote-tips.net/

 

[Marc Kupper]

Oops! I just took a look at the gmail sent-mail folder which has an
option to look at the raw message. It turns out that when Outlook
sends messages it is formatting them correctly, and as I expected, and
the problem was on the receiving side where Outlook is getting smart
and reformatting the message.

Outlook 2003 has a thing where at the top of some messages it'll say
"Extra line breaks in the message were removed." I've always
ignored that assuming that what it was doing was removing spurious
blank lines. It turns out that it also doing some "smart
reformatting" of my messages. Thus I can now view the haiku in its
intended state un clicking on the "line breaks removed"
notification and it'll give me an option to look at the original
message.

I can also control this with Tools / Options / Preferences (tab) /
[E-mail Options...] / "Remove extra line breaks in plain text
messages." I've turned this off for now so that I can see messages
in the same format that they were sent to me.

Outlook actually sent plain text, but quoted-printable encoded
(which I'd love to stop; even the InternetMailTextEncoding
registry setting described in the article you cited in your other
thread did not prevent that).

The Microsoft article I cited has the wrong location in the registry
for the InternetMailTextEncoding option. See
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=278134 which has the correct location
and it seems to work for me. I changed the encoding to 2 and the
message was sent using base64. I also tried 3 which should have forced
8-bit encoding but I ended up with 7-bit - maybe because I was forcing
a character set that did not support the characters I used. I then
changed the character set to "auto" and now
InternetMailTextEncoding works exactly as documented. With
InternetMailTextEncoding at "auto" (value is 0) I got
quoted-printable encoding and then was able to send the same message
using base64 and then 8bit encoding by changing the value to 2 and then
3.

Are you sending through Exchange? Using WE(ISO) instead of autoselect uses
QP (It might always use QP but breaks lines- i need unbroken lines and
choosing WE(ISO) works for me.)

I was sending directly (not via Exchange). I used to send via Exchange
and nailing down the character set and encoding was a challenge at
times.

I played with the settings you mentioned though I'm not sure what
"QP" is. It turns out that it did not seem to matter if I used
WE(ISO) or US-ASCII. When Googling I had seem some articles where
people said they had better luck with US-ASCII. I'm not sure if it
matters though as it seems to first do the wrapping, then the character
set encoding, and finally the message encoding (printed-quotable,
base64, 8bit, etc.).

If you are using Internet (not Exchange) and need unbroken lines then
setting WrapLines to 0 (see http://support.microsoft.com/?id=823921)
should do it. I'm using auto/auto for character encoding / message
encoding and as I was using some 8-bit characters I got unwrapped text
send using
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

As it was quoted printable the raw data sent is formatted into lines of
up to 71 characters with each line ending in "=" to tell the
decoder that it was continued on the next line.

I changed InternetMailTextEncoding to 3 (8bit message encoding) and
that forced the message to send my test message as a single very long
(13,333 byte) unbroken line.

Anyway - Thank you to Brian and Diane for your responses as they were
helpful in getting me to understand the nitty-gritty of Outlook a bit
better.

Marc

 

[Brian Tillman]

Are you sending through Exchange? Using WE(ISO) instead of autoselect
uses QP (It might always use QP but breaks lines- i need unbroken
lines and choosing WE(ISO) works for me.)

Yes, I'm using Exchange and another article in the KB says that the registry
settings we've been discussing don't apply in that case. The autoselect
setting you describe (Tools>Options>Mail Format>International
Options>Autoselect encoding, I presume) doesn't seem to affect my outgoing
mail in any way and neither does trying to force US-ASCII. My outgoing
plain text is always quoted-printable. It must be Exchange's fault. Darn.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I played with the settings you mentioned though I'm not sure what
"QP" is.

Quoted-Printable.