[rt-users] Optimization for Outlook HTML

Christopher Gilmore c-gilmore at northwestern.edu
Mon Apr 27 11:42:25 EDT 2015


We've recently upgraded RT from the version in our old distro (3.8.7) to 4.2.10 (incidentally moving from Ubuntu 10.04 to 14.04).

First things first: Plain text messaging is flawless. Set $PreferRichText to 0 and use the plain text templates, everything just works. We were using plain text on the old install, and we're ok with keeping it indefinitely.

We're a small IT group within the University. The University became an Exchange shop a few years ago, so 90% of our clients are using Outlook 2010 or 2013. Set $PreferRichText to 1, enable the HTML templates, and the Outlook HTML becomes obvious by way of the extra blank lines in both the outgoing email messages and when viewing tickets through the web interface.

I'm well aware of the cause - Outlook uses paragraphs (<P>) instead of line breaks (<BR>) when the user hits Enter. I'm aware of the multiple methods to correct for this on the client side; unfortunately, we're not in a position to mandate how people compose email.

Has anyone been able to sanitize Outlook HTML to eliminate the extra whitespace? Either through RT itself or by manipulating the message via procmail prior to handing it to rt-mailgate?

$CheckMoreMSMailHeaders doesn't help since the problem is in the HTML rather than the plain text. Likewise, I installed and tried all the HTML parsers (explicitly setting $HTMLFormatter) without success, presumably because that's for converting HTML to plain.

I also tried installing HTML::Gumbo, just in case the HTML sanitization applied to more than just tables.

Thanks in advance for any tips for handling this!



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