Some emails display unexpected indentation when viewed in certain email clients. This article explains why this happens, how Shipfix handles it, and what you can do to prevent it.
What You May Be Seeing
When viewing an email that has gone through multiple rounds of replies — especially where content was manually edited or copy-pasted from a previous message — you may notice that some or all of the text appears progressively indented. In some cases, the indentation can be significant, particularly in long reply chains.
Root Cause
This behaviour is caused by the accumulation of HTML blockquote tags in the underlying email source. Here’s how it happens:
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When an email client creates a reply, it wraps the quoted content in a <blockquote> HTML tag. This is a widely adopted standard used by virtually all email clients, not something specific to Shipfix.
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Each level of reply nesting adds another <blockquote> tag. Most email clients render this tag with one level of indentation, so a deeply nested reply chain will display progressively indented content.
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If content is manually edited or copy-pasted from an existing email, the original HTML formatting — including any accumulated blockquote tags — is carried over. Over multiple edits, this causes the indentation to stack up significantly.
How Shipfix Handles This
Shipfix currently force-aligns all email content to the left, which overrides the indentation that blockquote tags would otherwise produce. As a result, this issue is not typically visible when reading emails within Shipfix.
However, if the same email is viewed in another client (such as Outlook), the accumulated indentation may become visible. Outlook applies a similar override — but only for emails originally composed in Outlook. Emails that originate from other mail clients may still display the indentation as intended by the HTML.
Recommendation
To avoid carrying over accumulated HTML formatting from previous replies, use the Copy as New feature in Shipfix when creating a fresh email based on existing content.