How can I send an email with the format expected?

I'm in a position to send emails to a hundred or more recipients. To be safe, I first construct the message in MS Word - then paste it to the body of the email. To be extra safe, I'll email the message to myself. Then, I paste the message to the plethora of recipients and to myself. When I open the email, I find that much of the formatting that I painstakingly incorporated are lost.

Is there a way to ensure that the formatting is transposed to the outgoing email?

Hello, @lbeck.

What email program are you using? Office Outlook? Store app Outlook? Other?

lbeck said:

Is there a way to ensure that the formatting is transposed to the outgoing email?

I don't think so, no.

If you are sending 100 emails then do you know what they will all be read on? A phone? A Windows PC? A iPad? What size screen? What email client they use?

You'll be OK with simple things like bold, underlined big and small but placing an object (a picture for example) in a specific place isn't going to work (or at least I can't imagine how it could). Some email clients (that is the ones that the people you send your mail to use) will either not display it at all (they could even display text only) or put them all at the bottom.

Would it be possible to send your formatted document as a pdf attachment? Most everything will open a pdf OK and keep the formatting as it should be - you can just use Word to "save as" pdf as that is where you composed it.

The program that I'm using is Mozilla Thunderbird. But I could use Google (Gmail on the www). The most recent frustration was formatting the memo in Word, then cut/pasting it into Gmail (from Gmail.com on the www). The pasted text lost most of the Word formatting so I reformatted it in Gmail. Mostly restoring paragraph breaks. Then sent the reformatted text to 160 recipients, including myself. When I opened the memo in Thunderbird the formatting was terrible with double-spaced lines and quadruple-spaces between paragraphs. That is what precipitated this query.

I don't know what email client the recipients are using, and of course my main objective is getting my message delivered. My concern is that it looks unprofessional to see the rotten formatting.

lbeck said:

The program that I'm using is Mozilla Thunderbird. But I could use Google (Gmail on the www). The most recent frustration was formatting the memo in Word, then cut/pasting it into Gmail (from Gmail.com on the www). The pasted text lost most of the Word formatting so I reformatted it in Gmail. Mostly restoring paragraph breaks. Then sent the reformatted text to 160 recipients, including myself. When I opened the memo in Thunderbird the formatting was terrible with double-spaced lines and quadruple-spaces between paragraphs. That is what precipitated this query.

I don't know what email client the recipients are using, and of course my main objective is getting my message delivered. My concern is that it looks unprofessional to see the rotten formatting.

I understand your frustration. I was in business once upon a time. Now retired.

Yes, copy/paste into other editing boxes is a bear. I suggest, if at all possible, to use Office Outlook. Probably the most-used professional email program and client. You may want to experiment which format is best. Of course how your sent emails are seen does depend on the device and email client your recipients use.

Change the message format to HTML, Rich Text Format, or plain text - Outlook

Okay. Thanks for all the response. For my purposes and the reader's I think that creating a PDF is unnecessary. I only was thinking that there was something simple that I'm missing. I'd try the HTML option but as you say some readers' security software may reject it.

I'll go with the comment that no one expects email to be pretty.

lbeck said:

I'll go with the comment that no one expects email to be pretty.

I would expect it to be pretty. You can do it (put in backgrounds and such) but mostly they are annoying to the recipient.

If I got a random email demanding something (usually money) I'd expect it to be formatted correctly and I'd rather it wasn't formatted at all than formatted badly.

I certainly wouldn't give money to someone who couldn't even format their request.

If you don't know how then don't - put it in a pdf. Simple as that - just a line saying "look at this".

You'll get better results that way I think.

There's also a way to insert the body as a picture. Any links place outside of it.