Extra spacing when emailing to Evernote

[OldRod 0]

Whenever I forward an email from Gmail to my Evernote account, when it gets into Evernote, there are a lot of extra spaces between lines, even lines that do not have a hard carriage return at the end.  Is there anything I can do to prevent this?  

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi.  How many methods of email forwarding have you tried?  There's a Gmail filter,  IFTTT,  Zapier and a few other apps that include some process automation.  I'll confess I use a filter and have the same issue,  but the traffic is limited and the extra spaces aren't a major issue.  I tend to edit things more neatly if/ when I actually need to use the content.

[OldRod 0]

I only tried it one way, but I tried it with several different emails.

I am just selecting the email in Gmail and forwarding it to my Evernote address.  I don't have any filters that I know of.

Yeah, I can edit the note manually, but if it's a long one, that gets tedious.  Was just hoping there was a different way to get the email into Evernote without all the extra spacing.

[gazumped 11,652]

Have you tried Simplify or Remove Formatting?  That tends to tidy up the layout.  Try it on a copy of a note first though - it tends to tidy with extreme prejudice sometimes...

[OldRod 0]

Well, that removed the formatting alright... but it left the extra spaces between the lines LOL

I'll just stick to cleaning it up by hand I guess.

Thank though!

[gazumped 11,652]

Hmmn.  Well I just sent a few random emails from Gmail to Evernote,  intending to look at ways of removing spare lines - and confusingly didn't get any additional spacing at all. 

I'm on Windows 10 and Firefox - what's your OS and browser?

[OldRod 0]

Windows 10 using Chrome

[CalS 5,280]

Lines seem to be added in personal emails in my world.  Example below.  

I'm reasonably sure it has to do with the <p> html paragraph tags that are in the body of the email then note.  Interpreted as double line in the note versus single in the original.  Remove formatting leaves an extra line (<p> is replaced with <div><br /></div>).

 

   

[OldRod 0]

That makes sense.  I am seeing it in personal emails.  Organizations that send me other emails that look more professional (I don't know how else to describe it - they have custom fonts, headers, etc.) don't exhibit the extra spacing when forwarded to EN.

 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

@OldRod, is there a way to set your e-mail program to remove HTML formatting either when downloading e-mail or forwarding it? Of course, this might have other unintended results.

[OldRod 0]

No idea - I am just using Gmail's default settings in Chrome.

[garockey 3]

I thought I should search the forums to see if this topic has already been discussed, and indeed it has!  It doesn't look like anyone from EN has spoken definitively on the subject.

When I forward an email to Evernote, I also find that it adds spaces (technically, it looks like it double-spaces paragraphs).  If I convert the paragraphs to a bulleted list and then turn the bulleted list off, the double-spaced paragraphs revert to single spaced paragraphs, but with blank spaces added between each paragraph.  I can delete those blank spaces to get things looking (mostly) like the original email.  But isn't it strange to have to do this?  Shouldn't the email just appear in Evernote as it was originally formatted?

 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

19 hours ago, garockey said:

I thought I should search the forums to see if this topic has already been discussed, and indeed it has!  It doesn't look like anyone from EN has spoken definitively on the subject.

When I forward an email to Evernote, I also find that it adds spaces (technically, it looks like it double-spaces paragraphs).  If I convert the paragraphs to a bulleted list and then turn the bulleted list off, the double-spaced paragraphs revert to single spaced paragraphs, but with blank spaces added between each paragraph.  I can delete those blank spaces to get things looking (mostly) like the original email.  But isn't it strange to have to do this?  Shouldn't the email just appear in Evernote as it was originally formatted?

 

I suspect it's a matter of how the original e-mail was formatted, and how Evernote interprets that formatting. The HTML coding in the e-mail may have something that EN interprets differently than the e-mail interface does. See the suggestion by @csihilling in the thread above:

On 3/18/2017 at 11:46 AM, csihilling said:

I'm reasonably sure it has to do with the <p> html paragraph tags that are in the body of the email then note.  Interpreted as double line in the note versus single in the original.  Remove formatting leaves an extra line (<p> is replaced with <div><br /></div>).

Are you also using Gmail? I don't use it much, but just tested forwarding a couple of things and didn't get extra lines added. Normally I use Thunderbird with a non-Gmail POP3 e-mail account; forwarding from there doesn't add any lines either. So I suspect it may have to do with HTML formatting in the underlying code in the specific e-mails that you're forwarding. Not that that helps solve the problem or anything!

[gazumped 11,652]

4 hours ago, garockey said:

If I convert the paragraphs to a bulleted list and then turn the bulleted list off, the double-spaced paragraphs revert to single spaced paragraphs

Nice - I get the extra line breaks in my emails too.  So far I've been deleting them manually where I care about the look of the text (which is not often) but that bullets on / bullets off trick might be useful!  Thanks for the tip...