How do I add linefeed to email message body text?

[nlights]

My application is sending automatic emails, but the formatting leaves something to be desired.

I'm trying to achieve this:

Hello!

Thank you for your inquiry.


Regards,

Pertti

I'm writing Xbasic code like this:

...
pm.message = "Hello!"+crlf(2)+"Thank you for your inquiry."+crlf(2)+"Regards, "+crlf()+"Pertti"
...

What I get in the email is this:

Hello!Thank you for your inquiry.Regards,Pertti

What am I doing wrong?

[Steve Wood]

Re: How do I add linefeed to email message body text?

I do it like this:

msg = <<%txt%
Hello!

Thank you for your inquiry.

Regards,

Pertti
%txt%

pm.message = msg

or another example

msg = <<%txt%
Hello!{crlf()}
Thank you for your inquiry.
{crlf()}
Regards,
{crlf()}
{mysignaturevar}
%txt%

msg = evaluate_string(msg)
pm.message = msg

[Steve Workings]

Re: How do I add linefeed to email message body text?

Most email messages are presented in HTML these days, so the crlf() is not recognized. But a "<br>" is.

[Steve Wood]

Re: How do I add linefeed to email message body text?

Thinking of what Steve said, pm.message is for sure plain text. But if you also are saving this same text also to pm.html_message then this is the problem. If you define both pm.message and pm.html_message, then your email is going to be sent via html and "<br>" is appropriate. If you are only sending pm.message, then "<br>" would just appear as "<br>" and not a hard return. If you specifically do want both text and html then you have to define TWO different strings, one for pm.message as plain text, one for pm.html_message as HTML.

Again, it only sends as HTML if you define and populate pm.html_message.

[nlights]

Re: How do I add linefeed to email message body text?

Perfect. It took a bit of additional tweaking, but your suggestions eventually got me there. I like.

BTW, it appears to me that if both html and "plain" messages are defined, the system prefers to send the html message over the plain one. Is this so? At least in my testing it sure looked like that's how it works -- with both messages were defined, I got only one email and it was the html -one. And if this is the case, how are we supposed to know that? I searched the wiki for more information for this , but it was all in vain.

I could say something about A5 documentation here, yet again, but I'll bite my tongue instead. This time.

Thank you for your help!

[Steve Wood]

Re: How do I add linefeed to email message body text?

The plain text/html email option is as old as html email itself, not really something Alpha has to include in their documentation. Since HTML formatted email was introduced, we've had the ability to send HTML or plain text, or both. If you send both, then the recipients email client determines which one to extract (i.e.: you have no control as the sender).

Today most people configure to HTML, and that surely is the default. But it really wasn't that long ago that HTML email was despised or at least mistrusted. HTML format has a higher chance of being seen as SPAM, although that probably is not as big a deal as it used to be since, as Steve said, most deliver as HTML.

BTW, although I am not that old, I was at AT&T when email "CC" was first introduced. The President sent an email CC'd to all employees, all 77,000. And of course, the CC names were all listed at the start of the now 1300 page email. I think that is where they came up with BCC!

[nlights]

Re: How do I add linefeed to email message body text?

Oh, I guess I learn something new every day. And more so lately, since I haven't done this type of work in a long while. Given that many people come into A5 web development from the desktop world, I would still make a point that it would be nice to have a quick explanation of this right at the spot in the documentation where these two options are mentioned. Redundant, yes, but like they used to say (and probably still do) in the old country: "Repetition is the mother of learning."

Funny story about CC. I keep getting emails from my daughter's school all the time with a whole bunch of names in the CC -list, ready to be harvested by some unscrupulous character. That is actually one reason why I have been using A5 to build a communications platform of sorts for her school's sports teams that handles emails as fluidly and securely as possible. Give a man a gun, and he will shoot himself in the foot.