[MlMt] Mailmate-sent emails not creating satisfying paragraph spacing in other emailers

[Glenn Parker]

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
glenn.parker at comcast.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freron.com/pipermail/mailmate/attachments/20260226/66d7732d/attachment.htm>