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I have a flat file with lines of data. When I pipe it through /bin/mail to myself, however, the text in my MS Outlook mail box will have certain lines next to each other (EOL lost). For example, the file has

... 
20100115  0.48856  0.53141  0.36264  0.36237
20100119  0.48047  0.53160  0.36643  0.36516 
20100120  0.48551  0.53396  0.36970  0.36690
20100121  0.53207  0.55707  0.38302  0.37606
....

and if I run cat data.txt | mail [email protected], I see

... 
20100115  0.48856  0.53141  0.36264  0.36237
20100119  0.48047  0.53160  0.36643  0.36516 20100120  0.48551  0.53396  0.36970  0.36690
20100121  0.53207  0.55707  0.38302  0.37606
....

Regardless of if I convert the flat file to unix or dos format, this happens. And it always happens to certain lines but not others. And after some experiment, turns out that if the first word of the next line ends with 0, then this always happens.

Why would that be? Any solution to the problem would be much appreciated.

3
  • While this problem could be solved programmatically, I doubt that your mail implementation lacks functionality that allows sending mail to Windows clients. Since "Any" solution would be appreciated, perhaps, you would instead try asking at superuser.com?
    – P Shved
    Aug 17, 2010 at 16:45
  • Outlook likes to "prettify" things. I'd use the "check source" (or "see original") functionality in Outlook to see if it's really lost or if it's just displaying it that way. I'd guess the latter. Aug 17, 2010 at 16:55
  • Thanks for migrating my question here. I attempted to see Outlook source code following the instrux on this page, but I am still not able to see the source. The "Internet headers" field in "Message Optons" ends "Return-path" value, not the body of the email. Do you know why that might be the case and how do I see the source? I'm running Outlook 2003 SP3 under a 64x Windows XP, with Symantec Enterprise Vault behind our corporate firewall.
    – Zhang18
    Aug 20, 2010 at 13:00

1 Answer 1

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From this knowledge base article, the steps to Disable the feature that removes extra line breaks in Outlook 2003 are:

  1. Open Outlook.
  2. On the Tools menu, click Options.
  3. On the Preferences tab, click the E-mail Options button.
  4. Click to clear the Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages check box.
  5. Click OK two times.

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