Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 27 Feb 2026, at 6:03, Henry Seiden wrote: I have the “big three” (Microsoft Outlook, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail). But use their clients rarely. I do use Apple Mail on I-Devices particularly. Testing my own email coming back from their servers but viewing in MailMate. Perhaps the defects are covered up in that respect and also by the fact that mown email is sent in Markup (sections), generally they seem to be the same when viewed, coming back to me. From my understanding of the discussion, you need to send an email from MailMate, then view and reply using Outlook with the default setting to remove whitespace, then view the reply using MailMate (or any proper mail client, not Outlook). --Randall ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 27 Feb 2026, at 5:50, Bill Cole wrote: Beyond that there is ALSO an issue of how to structure the text of a plain text message so that it is displayed reasonably on screens of all widths, in whatever font the recipient prefers. The ideal choice would be for all MUAs to support the "format=flowed" attribute (RFC3676) and offer users coherent formatting choices. MailMate does so but many MUAs do bad things with format=flowed messages, as a consequence of Microsoft sabotage and to some degree a failure of web archivers of public mailing lists. As the author of the Format=Flowed RFCs, I agree. Unfortunately, going back to when they first embraced Internet technology, Microsoft engineers have a nasty habit of apparently looking only at the examples of an RFC and implementing what they think the example means, leaving everyone else to implement Microsoft's brokenness less they be blamed for incompatibility with Microsoft. --Randall ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 18:53, Jason Davies wrote: > Every now and then I think of how much electricity/storage/etc is wasted on > 'pretty' emails... Everything is absolutely dwarfed by video (Zaphod Beeblebrox would have been an influencer) and, increasingly, by AI. If you cut them out – apart from an instant revolution – I don't think we're actually doing that bad, when consider how much more efficient CPUs and storage have become. Charlie -- Charlie Clark Sengelsweg 34 Düsseldorf D- 40489 Tel: +49-203-746000 Mobile: +49-178-782-6226 ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 27 Feb 2026, at 14:50, Bill Cole wrote: > I wish that were sufficiently true but as of last Spring, it was still > somewhat common for mail exchangers to not announce support for the SMTPUTF8 > extension which is required to avoid Base64, Quoted-Printable, or (very > rarely today) UUCode encoding. I had to manually use uudecode the other week and living in an area where ASCII doesn't work, I can confirm that a lot more e-mails than you might imagine still get encoded. Charlie -- Charlie Clark Sengelsweg 34 Düsseldorf D- 40489 Tel: +49-203-746000 Mobile: +49-178-782-6226 ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
I have the “big three” (Microsoft Outlook, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail). But use their clients rarely. I do use Apple Mail on I-Devices particularly. Testing my own email coming back from their servers but viewing in MailMate. Perhaps the defects are covered up in that respect and also by the fact that mown email is sent in Markup (sections), generally they seem to be the same when viewed, coming back to me. Respectfully, Henry Seiden - - Techworks Pro Co. E: infotechworksprocom W: http://techworkspro.com On 27 Feb 2026, at 8:50, Bill Cole wrote: > On 2026-02-26 at 21:20:13 UTC-0500 (Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:20:13 -0800) > Randall Gellens > is rumored to have said: > >> (There was a time when sending anything that used characters not present in >> U.S. ASCII did require a form of encoding, but these days support for >> Unicode is pretty robust.) > > I wish that were sufficiently true but as of last Spring, it was still > somewhat common for mail exchangers to not announce support for the SMTPUTF8 > extension which is required to avoid Base64, Quoted-Printable, or (very > rarely today) UUCode encoding. > > Beyond that there is ALSO an issue of how to structure the text of a plain > text message so that it is displayed reasonably on screens of all widths, in > whatever font the recipient prefers. The ideal choice would be for all MUAs > to support the "format=flowed" attribute (RFC3676) and offer users coherent > formatting choices. MailMate does so but many MUAs do bad things with > format=flowed messages, as a consequence of Microsoft sabotage and to some > degree a failure of web archivers of public mailing lists. > > > -- > Bill Cole > [email protected] or [email protected] > (AKA @[email protected] and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses) > Please keep discussion mailing list replies *on-list* > Not Currently Available For Hire > ___ > mailmate mailing list > Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 27 Feb 2026, at 14:12, Randall Gellens wrote: > On 27 Feb 2026, at 5:05, Jeroen van der Ham-de Vos via mailmate wrote: > >> On 26 Feb 2026, at 12:11, Jason Davies wrote: >> >>> Thanks everyone. As I suspected, it's an Outlook problem that I can't save >>> others from having to deal with (they of course would simply say 'can't you >>> use Outlook?' at which point I start counting the days until I retire). >>> >> >> Specifically it is the Outlook “feature” of removing extra line breaks: >> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/outlook/message-body/line-breaks-are-removed-in-posts-made-in-plain-text > > That implies that it only happens with plain text email (not HTML) and that > two or more successive blank lines are preserved, only single blank lines are > removed. Ah sorry, I posted the link too quickly. This Microsoft KB post is about the whitespace removal feature not working as intended (*as intended by Microsoft*). Normally, when whitespace is removed (any number of blank lines), a banner appears saying that whitespace has been removed. Apparently this post is about where this indication does not appear even when whitespace has been removed. So, default behavior for Outlook is to remove blank lines as much as possible, provide an unobtrusive banner indicating that this has occured to the user, and then continue to mangle the layout of emails when responding or forwarding. The KB does help explain how to disable that feature though. Regards, Jeroen. ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 2026-02-26 at 21:20:13 UTC-0500 (Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:20:13 -0800) Randall Gellens is rumored to have said: (There was a time when sending anything that used characters not present in U.S. ASCII did require a form of encoding, but these days support for Unicode is pretty robust.) I wish that were sufficiently true but as of last Spring, it was still somewhat common for mail exchangers to not announce support for the SMTPUTF8 extension which is required to avoid Base64, Quoted-Printable, or (very rarely today) UUCode encoding. Beyond that there is ALSO an issue of how to structure the text of a plain text message so that it is displayed reasonably on screens of all widths, in whatever font the recipient prefers. The ideal choice would be for all MUAs to support the "format=flowed" attribute (RFC3676) and offer users coherent formatting choices. MailMate does so but many MUAs do bad things with format=flowed messages, as a consequence of Microsoft sabotage and to some degree a failure of web archivers of public mailing lists. -- Bill Cole [email protected] or [email protected] (AKA @[email protected] and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses) Please keep discussion mailing list replies *on-list* Not Currently Available For Hire ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 27 Feb 2026, at 5:05, Jeroen van der Ham-de Vos via mailmate wrote: On 26 Feb 2026, at 12:11, Jason Davies wrote: Thanks everyone. As I suspected, it's an Outlook problem that I can't save others from having to deal with (they of course would simply say 'can't you use Outlook?' at which point I start counting the days until I retire). Specifically it is the Outlook “feature” of removing extra line breaks: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/outlook/message-body/line-breaks-are-removed-in-posts-made-in-plain-text That implies that it only happens with plain text email (not HTML) and that two or more successive blank lines are preserved, only single blank lines are removed. --Randall ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 12:11, Jason Davies wrote: > Thanks everyone. As I suspected, it's an Outlook problem that I can't save > others from having to deal with (they of course would simply say 'can't you > use Outlook?' at which point I start counting the days until I retire). > Specifically it is the Outlook “feature” of removing extra line breaks: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/outlook/message-body/line-breaks-are-removed-in-posts-made-in-plain-text Regards, Jeroen. ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 9:37, Charlie Clark wrote: In order for HTML to work in e-mail, it had to be pretty verbose with lots of tags for the simplest of things. The result then has to be "encoded" into UU (unix-to-unix) format and you need the plain text version as well. This means that HTML mails are generally **at least** three times the size of a plain text one. And they don't say any more, often less. HTML, no matter how verbose, uses text characters, nothing binary, and so is sent as-is, not encoded using UUencode. UUEncode was a very early mechanism for encoding binary data as plain text, and was used way back in the '90s. Since then, email has advanced with standardized multimedia mechanisms. These days, a binary attachment can very often be transmitted as-is in email, if the originating client, the originating server, the recipient server, and the recipient's client support the extension. If any element doesn't support it, the binary part is encoded using base64 (not UUencode), which does explode it to three times the size. (There was a time when sending anything that used characters not present in U.S. ASCII did require a form of encoding, but these days support for Unicode is pretty robust.) --Randall ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
This might be of interest, though it probably won’t solve your problem: [The Complete Guide to Email Client Rendering Differences in 2026](https://dev.to/aoifecarrigan/the-complete-guide-to-email-client-rendering-differences-in-2026-243f) It covers email rendering issues with Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and Yahoo Mail. The audience is email senders/generators who want their email to look good for as many recipients as possible. It helps explain why it’s so difficult. I assume Benny is already familiar with most of these quirks and that MailMate tries to avoid most of them in its HTML output. Outlook is particularly bad in this area. Different versions of “Outlook”, and there are many versions, use completely different rendering engines. Older desktop Outlook clients used Microsoft Word to render, which is where the worst problems seem to originate. There’s a lot of tweaks for conditional email formatting based on whether Outlook is doing the rendering. Newer desktop versions of Outlook, and the web-based versions (Outlook.com), and the Mac OS version, all use modern web engines (a la Chromium), so they see fewer issues. Apparently, Microsoft is winding down support for the Word-based email rendering this coming October. On 25 Feb 2026, at 11:58, Jason Davies wrote: Dear list, This is going to be hard to describe because it is all about how Mailmate renders text (I think)... When I create a new paragraph in a Mailmate email I hit return twice. I see a clear line between the paragraphs and it looks fine. This is using Markdown, not plain text. When people reply to me, their messages look fine too with healthy paragraph spacing but my text below theirs (taken from my original email) no longer has the extra white space. There are no gaps between the paragraphs which makes it look very crowded. They are using Outlook 99% of the time. I can't be absolutely sure what they are seeing but if they are seeing it without paragraphs, that's just nasty and probably horrible for anyone with visual issues or dyslexia. If I open these messages in Outlook, the white space is missing there too so I think Outlook is compressing the paragraphs somehow for all readers. Is there something I can do to ensure that the paragraphing has persistent white space? Adding a third return key doesn't appear to do anything to change this (I imagine this is typical md/html behaviour). Any ideas very welcome. Cheers, Jason___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate Glenn P. Parker [email protected] ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 17:37, Charlie Clark wrote: On 26 Feb 2026, at 12:11, Martin S Taylor wrote: I certainly don’t. Can you point to somewhere which explains it? There used to be elegant discussions of the subject but they now seem to be swamped by the marketeers' guff. The European Commission has something to say on the subject, ironically it's in the form of a PDF. E-mail should always be plain text, because that was how it was developed and how many of the conventions that we've grown used to in text communication, such as asterisks for **emphasis** or underlines for __highlighting__ and even emojis, were developed. Add to these replying below, selecting text to quote and threading. All great ideas that have, more or less, had to be reinvented in everything that has tried to replace e-mail. Yes, I understand (and agree with) all of that. But we are where we are, and I receive emails in every kind of format, and I like to quote bits of them when I reply. What I don’t understand is how to format the quoted bits. It would help if I understood Mailmate’s options such as “Prefer plain text” and Theme for plain text emails is Apple Mail (or whatever). And the whole thing about Courier as **the** typeface for plain text is absolute nonsense. Agreed. I should have the choice what font to display text in. When I display a message I’m composing (in Mailmate) and I’m working in split pane (so that text appears on the left as plain text and on the right as formatted in some way) is there a way of changing the font that text on the right-hand side appears in? I see it always in Helvetica, and it would be nice to have a choice. Martin___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 17:37, Charlie Clark wrote: Right, I'm off to join Bill and other oldtimers for a virtual beer muttering about great things were once 14,400 kb/s lines became available! ;-) Every now and then I think of how much electricity/storage/etc is wasted on 'pretty' emails... I'm with you but when I read in plain text, half the time I get unreadable garbage so end up turning it back on. The only virtue is that if someone uses a screenreader, URLs are absolute torture, and at least they can be occluded in html... (Can I confess I still miss using Mailsmith? I bet there are many other Mailsmith refugees here...was very relieved to find Mailmate when I had to move away from POP). Cheers, J___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 12:11, Martin S Taylor wrote: > I certainly don’t. Can you point to somewhere which explains it? There used to be elegant discussions of the subject but they now seem to be swamped by the marketeers' guff. The European Commission has something to say on the subject, ironically it's in the form of a PDF. E-mail should always be plain text, because that was how it was developed and how many of the conventions that we've grown used to in text communication, such as asterisks for **emphasis** or underlines for __highlighting__ and even emojis, were developed. Add to these replying below, selecting text to quote and threading. All great ideas that have, more or less, had to be reinvented in everything that has tried to replace e-mail. Back in the early 1970s bandwidth was extremely limited so every character in e-mail counted. There were also no screens that could render formatted text, so it was logical that all the effort went into the content of the e-mail and not how you wanted it to look. After all, you didn't know what kind of machine your correspondent was working on. Images and files came later as attachments and were just added as binary streams. The e-mail format is fairly flexible as it allows nesting of almost any type within a part. Simple but really useful for forwarding e-mails. HTML itself was also developed with little thought for presentation for similar reasons, it was supposed to make structuring documents easier and more consistent. But the marketing department of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and others had other ideas. Nowadays HTML with CSS has fairly robust rules for consistent presentation but the rendering engine that was used for the first HTML e-mails was Internet Explorer and it produced something that really could only be read in the same browser, embedded in Outlook. This was done with the more or less explicit aim of forcing people to switch to using Outlook for e-mail. In order for HTML to work in e-mail, it had to be pretty verbose with lots of tags for the simplest of things. The result then has to be "encoded" into UU (unix-to-unix) format and you need the plain text version as well. This means that HTML mails are generally **at least** three times the size of a plain text one. And they don't say any more, often less. If you look at any professional authoring software, or presentation guides, you'll see that the focus should always be on the content. You make things look good only once you know what you're going to say. And I personally find that, writing plain text helps me focus on **what** I want to say, **how** I want to phrase it and not on what it might look like. That's actual productivity. And the whole thing about Courier as **the** typeface for plain text is absolute nonsense. This was a decision taken by Microsoft possibly to mimic the other mail programs of the time, which used fixed space fonts, not just out of tradition, but because aligning text in things like tables was desired. But mail clients have always been free to choose whatever typeface they want to display e-mails. Courier, along with Arial and other typefaces in Windows were infamously designed on the cheap so that Microsoft wouldn't have to pay licence fees and designers have been moaning ever since… I think that Microsoft stuck with Courier in attempt to punish those who chose to continue to put content above style. Having used plain text for years, I decided to follow Benny's lead and let Mailmate produce HTML for those what want to read it. I continue to write in and read plain text and always recommend others do. Right, I'm off to join Bill and other oldtimers for a virtual beer muttering about great things were once 14,400 kb/s lines became available! ;-) Charlie -- Charlie Clark Sengelsweg 34 Düsseldorf D- 40489 Tel: +49-203-746000 Mobile: +49-178-782-6226 ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 17:02, Charlie Clark wrote: Actually, HTML is most definitely not WYSIWYG and was never supposed to be. This is one of the many reasons why HTML was not a good choice to use for e-mail. But that battle was fought (and lost) years ago… Like I said, it was a rough idea that had contestable details. RTF has also been used (not sure if it still is). Fact is, html *is* often used to render styled emails and is usually what is contrasted with plain text. No need to shoot the messenger...___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 12:50, Jason Davies wrote: Most emailers that do styled (or 'rich' as it's usually called) text do it with WYSIWYG – you select text and make it bold, and so on. Mailmate simply uses markdown (plain text with simple mark-up) which is converted to html for other emailers to read. Actually, HTML is most definitely **not** WYSIWYG and was **never** supposed to be. This is one of the many reasons why HTML was **not** a good choice to use for e-mail. But that battle was fought (and lost) years ago… For some Mac context, here's a video with Steve Jobs showing off "WYSWYG e-mails" in 1990, before HTML even existed, though Tim Berners-Lee would develop HTML on a similar system. At the time they were using Postscript but I think they went onto RTF later for a more universal format. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrTag7nSHlw Charlie -- Charlie Clark Sengelsweg 34 Düsseldorf D- 40489 Tel: +49-203-746000 Mobile: +49-178-782-6226 ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 12:44, Randall Gellens wrote: I mentioned that 99% of the email I send is plain text because the original poster mentioned using mark down, which gets converted to HTML when sent, and because it seems plausible that Outlook might behave differently with plain text versus HTML email. This is a useful thing to bear in mind, thank you, but given how often I'm including links and the like, it's too hit and miss for me to use. As I said at the start, what bothers me is that it can become a bit hard to read (and I often write long-ish emails) but it's impossible to tell exactly what other people see. Maybe it just compresses it when they reply and I'm worrying about nothing! (I can't recreate it by sending myself messages and replies). Cheers, Jason___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 3:00, Charlie Clark wrote: On 25 Feb 2026, at 18:55, Jason Davies wrote: I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean here? I have the option of plain text or markdown, correct? I'm typically including elements that require markdown so it defaults to that. Markdown is plain text. Well, it's plain text in the composition window, but the important thing here is that what gets sent "on the wire" is HTML. I mentioned that 99% of the email I send is plain text because the original poster mentioned using mark down, which gets converted to HTML when sent, and because it seems plausible that Outlook might behave differently with plain text versus HTML email. --Randall ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 11:11, Martin S Taylor wrote: I certainly don’t. Can you point to somewhere which explains it? Not sure if I'm pitching this right so taking the question very much at face value, forgive me if I email-splain. The headline version is that most emailers will work with 'styled' text ie bold, headings, and so on. This is usually done using html, so you're looking at something that is a bit (but not entirely) like a webpage when you look at an email. Most emailers that do styled (or 'rich' as it's usually called) text do it with WYSIWYG – you select text and make it bold, and so on. Mailmate simply uses markdown (plain text with simple mark-up) which is converted to html for other emailers to read. Markdown *is* plain text (eg using asterisks to indicate italics) but typically is read as a kind of rich text (making things look italic rather than simply rendering \* italics \* (without the spaces). (One could argue that html, which can be read by a plain text editor, is also ultimately plain text but that would not be particularly helpful here.) Everything I've said there is roughly correct but there are many specific cases in which footnotes could legitimately be added for exceptions or clarifications. Hope this helps. Cheers, Jason___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 26 Feb 2026, at 11:00, Charlie Clark wrote: I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean here? I have the option of plain text or markdown, correct? Markdown is plain text. (I was referring to the drop-down options when writing at the top, next to Signature.) Thanks everyone. As I suspected, it's an Outlook problem that I can't save others from having to deal with (they of course would simply say 'can't you use Outlook?' at which point I start counting the days until I retire). Cheers, Jason___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
> Markdown is plain text. The options are plain text, or, plain text + HTML > generated from Markdown. I think this is what many of use because most of our > correspondents don't know or understand the difference I certainly don’t. Can you point to somewhere which explains it? Martin On 26 Feb 2026, at 11:00, Charlie Clark wrote: ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 25 Feb 2026, at 18:55, Jason Davies wrote: > I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean here? I have the option of > plain text or markdown, correct? I'm typically including elements that > require markdown so it defaults to that. Markdown is plain text. The options are plain text, or, plain text + HTML generated from Markdown. I think this is what many of use because most of our correspondents don't know or understand the difference and are used to the abomination of HTML-based e-mail. MS Outlook gleefully makes a complete mess of the plain text when it replies, ignoring things like quote levels and line breaks and all the things that were developed over the years to make e-mail the really useful tool it became. Get used to switching between e-mail parts: View > Message Body Parts. Charlie -- Charlie Clark Sengelsweg 34 Düsseldorf D- 40489 Tel: +49-203-746000 Mobile: +49-178-782-6226 ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
I see this all the time, and 99% of my emails are sent as plain text, as I only use MarkDown when I need to format something, which is rare. --Randall ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 25 Feb 2026, at 17:42, Henry Seiden wrote: Have you thought about using MailMate natively in its default composer setting, E.G. a modified text format? I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean here? I have the option of plain text or markdown, correct? I'm typically including elements that require markdown so it defaults to that. All the other settings you list (thank you) are the same, except I have 'standard' instead of Apple Mail for theme, and have embedding etc of html to 'always' (hoping that it is more emphatic about formatting). The previews (and indeed messages I sent myself to test, even in Outlook) all look fine. It's specifically when (which looked fine on sending) gets a response from someone else that includes below their response. At that point has had white space stripped out. So I can't recreate it or systematically test it – I suspect it's something to do with other people's settings when they reply. I'll try Bill's suggestion of spaces and/or tabs (I assumed these wouldn't render but let's see!) Cheers, Jason ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 2026-02-25 at 11:58:02 UTC-0500 (Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:58:02 +) Jason Davies is rumored to have said: Dear list, This is going to be hard to describe because it is all about how Mailmate renders text (I think)... When I create a new paragraph in a Mailmate email I hit return twice. I see a clear line between the paragraphs and it looks fine. This is using Markdown, not plain text. When people reply to me, their messages look fine too with healthy paragraph spacing but my text below theirs (taken from my original email) no longer has the extra white space. There are no gaps between the paragraphs which makes it look very crowded. They are using Outlook 99% of the time. It has been over a decade since I used the Outlook+Exchange abomination but I can still envision the little brag/warn at the top of a well-spaced text email asserting that "extra" whitespace had been removed. I can't be absolutely sure what they are seeing but if they are seeing it without paragraphs, that's just nasty and probably horrible for anyone with visual issues or dyslexia. If I open these messages in Outlook, the white space is missing there too so I think Outlook is compressing the paragraphs somehow for all readers. As it long has... Is there something I can do to ensure that the paragraphing has persistent white space? Adding a third return key doesn't appear to do anything to change this (I imagine this is typical md/html behaviour). Any ideas very welcome. Lines with a space or tab on them? Maybe multiple spaces and tabs? That's a PURE guess. -- Bill Cole [email protected] or [email protected] (AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses) Not Currently Available For Hire ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
Dear Jason, Have you thought about using MailMate natively in its default composer setting, E.G. a modified text format? I’m using it on this message and to me in text based composing, it looks fine. I only use Markdown (MM) to create my signature section. The message in MM on my view screen (Preview at right) setting shows the received layout for editors that display in line html content. This seems to work fine for most client side app users. How does it look to you? I do not believe the message system used here changes anything much. My composer settings of note… menu>Settings: *** Composer>Preview>Display> ‘when generating HTML’ Replying/Forwarding HTML>’Embed when needed’ Embedding Method>’Inline CSS(Juice)’ *** Rich Text (HTML)>Markup Syntax>’Markdown’ Default Theme>’Apple Mail’ Styling Method>’Inlining (recommended)’ *** Respectfully, Henry Seiden - - Techworks Pro Co. E: infotechworksprocom W: http://techworkspro.com On 25 Feb 2026, at 11:58, Jason Davies wrote: > Dear list, > > This is going to be hard to describe because it is all about how Mailmate > renders text (I think)... > > When I create a new paragraph in a Mailmate email I hit return twice. I see a > clear line between the paragraphs and it looks fine. This is using Markdown, > not plain text. > > When people reply to me, their messages look fine too with healthy paragraph > spacing but my text below theirs (taken from my original email) no longer has > the extra white space. There are no gaps between the paragraphs which makes > it look very crowded. They are using Outlook 99% of the time. > > I can't be absolutely sure what they are seeing but if they are seeing it > without paragraphs, that's just nasty and probably horrible for anyone with > visual issues or dyslexia. If I open these messages in Outlook, the white > space is missing there too so I think Outlook is compressing the paragraphs > somehow for all readers. > > Is there something I can do to ensure that the paragraphing has persistent > white space? Adding a third return key doesn't appear to do anything to > change this (I imagine this is typical md/html behaviour). > > Any ideas very welcome. > > Cheers, > > Jason___ > mailmate mailing list > Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers
On 25 Feb 2026, at 17:58, Jason Davies wrote: > Is there something I can do to ensure that the paragraphing has persistent > white space? Adding a third return key doesn't appear to do anything to > change this (I imagine this is typical md/html behaviour). It's really down to the other mail program – Outlook produces particularly vile stuff both on plain text and HTML – so the only real option is to switch to viewing in HTML. My own particular bugbear is when Outlook sends HTML only with no typeface but a linespacing so that it looks slightly broken. Charlie -- Charlie Clark Sengelsweg 34 Düsseldorf D- 40489 Tel: +49-203-746000 Mobile: +49-178-782-6226 ___ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
