Perl-ish mail formatting question regarding "\t"

[- Bob -]

I'm stringing together some output that gets sent in a "plain text"
email from Perl Net::SMTP to a POP server and is then pulled by the
client. There's no MIME type, just plain text.

I use \t to do some crude layout. Unfortunately the tab character
seems to be ignored in MS Outlook/Express. It's in there, and if I
view the raw message source in Outlook I can see the tabs working
properly. But, it doesn't show up in the regular message viewing
window. (Note: MS changes to a proportional font in the regular
viewing window but I'd expect the tab to still space to some sort of
indent).

Thoughts on this? Is there another character combo besides \t that
would force the tab? Is this just a specific MS Outlook specific flaw?
Do I need to spew MIME headers to get this to work properly? (If so, I
could use a pointer to a sample of proper MIME mail header spewing).
Thanks,

 

[Bill H]

I'm stringing together some output that gets sent in a "plain text"
email from Perl Net::SMTP to a POP server and is then pulled by the
client. There's no MIME type, just plain text.

I use \t to do some crude layout. Unfortunately the tab character
seems to be ignored in MS Outlook/Express. It's in there, and if I
view the raw message source in Outlook I can see the tabs working
properly. But, it doesn't show up in the regular message viewing
window. (Note: MS changes to a proportional font in the regular
viewing window but I'd expect the tab to still space to some sort of
indent).

Thoughts on this? Is there another character combo besides \t that
would force the tab? Is this just a specific MS Outlook specific flaw?
Do I need to spew MIME headers to get this to work properly? (If so, I
could use a pointer to a sample of proper MIME mail header spewing).
Thanks,

Its an Outlook thing. If you want to control the layout best thing is
to go with mime headers and then you can use the <TT> tag to get fixed
font size and use spaces instead of tabs.

Bill H

 

[- Bob -]

Its an Outlook thing. If you want to control the layout best thing is
to go with mime headers and then you can use the <TT> tag to get fixed
font size and use spaces instead of tabs.

Bill H

Thanks. I was hoping to avoid MIME headers and keep the mail more
universal.