Line breaks being removed from email body

Question

I'm generating a simple email using the System.Net.Mail.MailMessage class and building the body with a StringBuilder. I'm looping through a string[] and trying to append a new line each time. The problem I'm having is that I can't seem to generate a single new line each time. I can either get two or none.

What I've tried:

foreach (var message in messages)
{
    body.AppendLine(message);
}

foreach (var message in messages)
{
    body.Append(message + "\n");
}

foreach (var message in messages)
{
    body.Append(message + System.Environment.NewLine);
}

I've also tried with string.Format().

For each example above, I get the same result. No new line being generated.

When I try the following, however, I get the expected result. A new line with an empty line in between.

foreach (var message in messages)
{
    body.AppendLine(message + System.Environment.NewLine);
}

Why is it doing this and what can I do to just get a single new line each time?

Update:

So I've found that Outlook and probably Gmail (haven't tested others) are actually removing some line breaks and not others. Does anyone know why or how they determine what to remove?

Answer 1

When I checked the email in Outlook, I got a tiny info message saying "Extra line breaks in this message were removed" and the option to restore them. Gmail gave no such indication (that I found) but I must assume it removed them as well.

Interestingly enough I had line breaks elsewhere in the body that worked as expected, only the ones in the loop were deemed "extra".

I have modified my code to build the email body using html.

IsBodyHtml = true

If anyone knows of a way to prevent this, or what causes certain line breaks to be removed, please let me know.

Update:

Once I knew what I was looking for, I found this post which helps to explain things and gives some alternate solutions. I did not try any of them, as I think using html is the better solution in my case.