Create Trello card via email, how to format description?

Question

I use Gmail as email client. When I create a Trello card by email the email body becomes the card description. However the formatting, e.g., line breaks, are ignored by Trello.

Any ideas if there is a way to keep the line breaks?

Answer 1

Because many mail clients automatically hard wrap long lines, Trello ignores single line breaks.

So if you send a message like this:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Many mail clients actually send something like this (note all the newlines):

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting
industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text
ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type
and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not
only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, 
remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with
the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and
more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker
including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Trello can't distinguish between linebreaks inserted by the mail client and linebreaks inserted manually, so it opts to ignore all single line breaks. If you want to create a card whose description contains multiple paragraphs, separate them with two line breaks (standard markdown syntax).

This description...

...will have multiple lines

But:

This description...
...won't

If you want hard-wrapped descriptions, there's no way to do that with Trello's default email to card functionality.