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Here’s the scenario: 

I have a long text field (called ‘Email Draft with Placeholder’), and a formula field (called ‘Email Draft’) where I’m replacing a few placeholder key using REGEXREPLACE.

I’m then displaying ‘Email Draft’ in a Record Review in the Interface. Here, it displays as expected, maintaining the new line breaks.

If you copy that text (by dragging across it and CMD+C), and paste it into a Gmail new email, it all still looks good.

But if I send the email, and look at what was sent, all the new lines are gone! 😱

I’d be really grateful if anyone could explain what’s going on here, and how I can fix it! 

Hm interestingly, when I copy from the formula field and paste into a Gmail compose window the line breaks don’t get copied over for me

As a workaround, I tried creating another long text field, pasted into that:

And then if I copy the value from the long text field and paste into Gmail, it looks fine and after sending the linebreaks are kept too

​@serenalambert2 

That is so strange! What a bizarre bug that you have discovered!

For what it’s worth, if you copy and paste the formula field into an email app — such as Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook or even the Gmail app itself on mobile devices — it works just fine!

The problem only crops up when copying from the formula field directly into the Gmail website!

This is so weird! I wonder if this is a Gmail bug or an Airtable bug or both? You may want to report this as a bug to support@airtable.com.

In the meantime, it looks like you can workaround this bug in one of these ways:

  1. Use the trick that Adam outlined above.
     
  2. Use an email app instead of the Gmail website.
     
  3. You can click on a button in Airtable to trigger a Make Gmail automation which would create a new draft message for you in Gmail. Then, you could switch over to the Gmail website and open up that draft message.

    If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Here’s the scenario: 

I have a long text field (called ‘Email Draft with Placeholder’), and a formula field (called ‘Email Draft’) where I’m replacing a few placeholder key using REGEXREPLACE.

I’m then displaying ‘Email Draft’ in a Record Review in the Interface. Here, it displays as expected, maintaining the new line breaks.

If you copy that text (by dragging across it and CMD+C), and paste it into a Gmail new email, it all still looks good.

But if I send the email, and look at what was sent, all the new lines are gone! 😱

I’d be really grateful if anyone could explain what’s going on here, and how I can fix it! 

Hello ​@serenalambert2,
This issue likely stems from how Gmail interprets line breaks—what looks like a newline visually may actually be a soft break (`\n`) that gets stripped on send. To preserve formatting, try converting line breaks to HTML `<br>` tags in your formula field, and ensure the email is sent as HTML. That should maintain the intended structure in the final email.

Best Regards,
Henry Cowan

No, that wont work, because a formula field only displays text, so it would just interpret the HTML tags as text.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

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