I heavily rely on a legacy text editor Vim. Below is what some test might look like: A major heading followed by a line, in turn followed by bullets.
2025-03-12 Wed 16:13
--------------------
Blah blah blah blah
* Blah blah blah blah
* Blah blah blah blah
* Blah blah blah blah
Blah blah blah blah
* Blah blah blah blah
* Blah blah blah blah
I sometimes send email to myself in order to easily access the text from anywhere and to dump it into a local Vim editor for further composition/revision. Much easier than signing into cloud accounts to access text files.
The problem is that the received email has all leading spaces stripped from *. It’s easy enough to add them back in with a powerful editor like Vim, but after years, it has become frustrating.
I use Outlook 2019 desktop. The space stripping happens regardless whether I format the outgoing message HTML, Plain Text, or Rich Text. It seems to happen when I use Consolas instead of the default font Calibri (Body). I rely on Consolas for its fixed width font and I abhor the excessive serifs of Courier.
It seems odd that my message would be modified in such a specific way and only under such specific circumstances. Why is this happening and how can I avoid it?
P.S. I don’t use the usual formatting of Outlook because I often make much more involved edits, for which I need Vim. In this sense, I am using email only as a carrier of text, for comprehensive manipulation outside of Outlook. I just want the text to be preserved.
