The Case of the Spurious Spaces

[Larry Paulausky]

Title: The Case of the Spurious Spaces

Hello all -

I am using Entourage X Version 10.1.4 SR1, and Mac OS X Version 10.3.2 on a G4 machine.

My problem has been around since I began using Entourage several months ago (I have always used the latest version of both Entourage and OS X available at the time).  When someone replies to one of my HTML e-mail messages, I often see that the quoted version of my original message has several spurious spaces inserted into it.  Here's a short example:


>> Hi Tracy -
>>
>> First, I am also sending you two   other e-mails today, one inquiring about
>> having you take over or  replace some  existing T1 circuits I have, and the
>> other, asking for  some tweaks of existing  billed service to place it more
>> in line with  what we really  need.


Note the extra space between "two" and "other" in the first line, and between "with" and "what" in the last line.  (BTW, I am carefully reviewing this message; there are no other instances of additional spaces in it, so if it reaches you with additional spaces, they have been spuriously added.  I do use the convention of two spaces after the end of a sentence and the beginning of the next.)

This does not always seem to happen, but I have not been able to detect any pattern of only certain recipients/respondents, only certain times of day,  etc.

I recall a previous question on this group where the issue of "curly quotes being morphed into strange characters when original text was quoted in a reply" was raised.  The advice received was to clear the Smart Quotes checkbox under Tools>AutoCorrect...>AutoFormat.  While I never saw that issue in any reply that quoted original text from me, the symptom was close enough to mine that I thought I would try the same remedy.  I did turn off the Smart Quotes checkbox about a month ago, but have seen no change in the frequency of occurrence of my problem.

I often send messages to important persons inside and outside of my organization, and I dislike the unprofessional light into which I may be cast by these spurious spaces — in a long message of several paragraphs, it can really look bad, as if the message was typed and sent without having been proofread.  This is not the image I would like to project.

Does anyone have any advice on solving the issue?  And, not to set off a dreaded "HTML vs. Plain Text" debate (I like to be able to use HTML for simple formatting), but does anyone know if this is any less likely to happen in non-HTML messages?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!


--
Best regards,

Larry Paulausky