Line Breaks in Templated Email

[leelefever]

Hello,

I use the templated email feature to send email to customers. Today when I logged in to copy the templated email message to a new product, the message was showing without line breaks. Previously, the message in the EJ interface displayed nicely, with breaks. Now it's all jumbled together in one long string with no breaks.



Has something changed? Do I need to add breaks to the templated email field? HTML?



Thanks!

[E-junkie_Guru]

What happens if you copy the whole message template and paste it into a plaintext editor (like Notepad in Windows)? Does it still look jumbled together? Sometimes a nicely-formatted template can appear a bit jumbled when crammed into that little Email Message box, but that's just an illusion because of the size constraints.



Can you send yourself a test thank-you email to see how the actual, as-issued email message looks? For testing purposes, you can either temporarily change the product price to 0.00 and Add to Cart the affected product to use our Free Checkout and then change the price back again, or if you'd rather not alter the product price, you can create a secret Cart Discount code that takes 100% off the Item Total, then apply that code in your cart to activate the Free Checkout option.



One thing that might be happening: Macs use one kind of newline marker, Linux uses another kind, and Windows uses both, so it might appear strange if you had originally created your thank-you message on a Mac and are now looking at it on Windows or Linux, or created it on Linux and are now looking at it on Mac or Windows. Our system knows how to handle the differences when generating the actual message, so this only affects how the template appears in that text field when looking at it on different systems.

[leelefever]

Thanks Tyson. I got it figured out, but I'd love to know if there is a fix.



It seems that this issue is related to using a Mac. When I use a Windows machine for pasting in the templated email info, it sticks. When using a Mac, it doesn't. What's strange is that I've used a Mac for a long time and never had this problem for previous products. It seems that this started for me sometime after 11/17/08 - the last time a product was a added with line breaks in emails.



In testing with the Mac and FireFox, here's what I was seeing...



When I copy the text into TextEdit, it looks jumbled with no breaks. When I purchase a product, the email that is sent has no breaks - just one big paragraph.



I've copied the good looking text from older products into the templated email field for the new products, but as soon as I hit "Next" and go back, the line breaks have been removed. It looks like whatever I do, the text for these products ends up being one giant paragraph.



I've tried it across Firefox and Safari, same thing.



As I said, it finally worked on PC/Firefox, but I can't seem to make it work on the Mac. This means, also, that I can't touch the EJ interface with my Mac, because it will take away the line breaks from the last products I added.



Any thoughts? I really don't want to have to use our PC to update products.



~Lee

[E-junkie_Guru]

Does the Mac issue affect the actual message we send (have you tried sending one to yourself with a test checkout)? Or does it only affect how the message/template looks in the Email Message text-entry box in Seller Admin but not in the actual email we send?



As described above, the issue has to do with the invisible "character" that marks an end-of-line/new-line (aka a "hard return"), as different operating systems use a different character for this purpose. Older "classic" Macs used a CR (carriage-return character), Linux and Mac OS X both use LF (line-feed character), and DOS/Windows uses both.



I will have to ask Development to consider this issue and the feasibility of improving our CR/LF handling.

[leelefever]

Tyson Asked>>: Does the Mac issue affect the actual message we send (have you tried sending one to yourself with a test checkout)?



Yes. I've purchased the product and received the email as one giant paragraph with no breaks.



I'm really hoping this can be addressed - it seems that something happened in the way the field is handled because I've had the same Mac computer for over a year and this only started happening in the last couple of months. Thanks for looking into it Tyson...

[moonleaf]

I have this same exact problem!



I have only been using Firefox on Mac OS X to edit, copy, and paste the templated email descriptions.



When I copy any part of the body of the templated email of one product and paste it into the body of the templated email of a second product, it messes up most of the line breaks in the body of the templated email of the second product.



I have to go in and manually put in the line breaks again--and with about 15-20 line breaks in each email for 10 products, that's a lot of manual changes...not very convenient.



So just to be clear, there has been no cross-operating system copy/pasting. All the content was created, copied, and pasted in Firefox on Mac OS X.



Hopefully this information helps

[tpirman]

I just discovered this problem, too. Our customers have been getting one long paragraph on thank-you emails for months. Very embarrassing! The email text looks fine when you first post it into the interface, but when you go back to the edit-item screen, the line breaks are all gone. Pasting from the Mac clipboard never works -- I have to manually insert the line breaks. Can you guys look into this?

[dre]

Hey - has anybody figured this out? I paste in my templated purchase response and stored codes. Both the codes and the email have lost their CR/LF.



I am a Mac user also.



It worked great on Wednesday.



I upgraded to Snow Leopard on Thursday.



The problem as described above today...



Please help... Having to purchase a PC to be able to use ejunkie is not an option...

[E-junkie_Guru]

The problem with line breaks disappearing was caused by a bug in Adobe's Flash player plugin for Mac browsers, which has been fixed:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/3538



If you update your Flash plugin, that should fix the problem for you. :^)

[trackmeister]

My solution (when the alleged Flash bug fix didn't work) was to simply download and install Flash 9 as my plugin for Firefox. Works fine.



Unfortunately I'd already paid to have 495 product listings changed one by one and now it has to be re-done.



A posting warning Mac users of this problem ought to be included in the instructions for using templated email.