How to prevent Outlook from removing extra line breaks from emails and email signatures

Problem:

An email client such as Outlook disrupts your plain text emails or email signatures by removing breaks between text lines.

Solution:

If you composed a plain text email (or a plain text email signature in CodeTwo software) and you used the Enter key to create individual text lines, this email/signature may be displayed as a single long line on the recipient's email client (Fig. 1.).

Fig. 1. Extra line breaks automatically removed from an email signature in Outlook 2013.

In the case of Outlook, the program tells you that the extra line breaks have been removed from the message (Fig. 1.). When you click the Restore line breaks option, the correct layout is restored (Fig. 2.).

Fig. 2. Restoring extra line breaks in Outlook 2013.

Such situations occur if the recipient has enabled the Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages option on their email client. This option is available in Outlook Options > Mail and is set as default in Outlook 2013 (Fig. 3.).

Fig. 3. The Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages option in Outlook 2013.

To prevent line breaks from being removed from emails/signatures, you can ask your recipients to disable the Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages option.

However, there is a more convenient and universal way to get the same result - you need to add a double tab (by pressing the tab key twice) at the end of each line in your plain text email/signature. If this doesn't work, another solution is to add three spaces instead of tabs.

The same issue may also occur if you use placeholders in email signatures and put them in separate lines of text.

Example:
You created a plain text signature with two placeholders, each one in a separate text line (so there's a line break between them). The first one is {Department} and the second is {Company}. If placeholder {Department} consists of more than 38 characters, you might experience the same problem as described earlier: your recipient's email client can remove the extra line break (Fig. 4.). To solve this problem, add a double tab (or three spaces, if tabs do not work) at the end of each line.

Fig. 4. Line breaks automatically removed from between placeholders.