How to theme simplenews newsletters in D7?

Question

I'm looking for something like a walk-through. (The guide here, http://drupal.org/node/268404, was apparently written before the D6 rewrite).

The reason I'm after this is that when I use the default simplenews newsletter format, and enter for the subject "test" and for the body "test content" my resulting emails look like this:

-------- TES
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Test content**myReport taxonomy**
**myURL**

-- Unsubscribe from this newsletter:
**myUnsubscribeURL**

(The contents between the ** are correct, I've left them out for privacy). But you can see the issues are things like:

1. The "t" at the end of "test," the last letter of the header, is left off for some reason.
2. I'm not sure where the hyphens are coming from, or how to modify that formatting decision. I'd like to eliminate the hyphens both before the heading, and between the heading and the body.
3. The body of the email abuts the name of the report taxonomy without space or break.
4. The body of the email comes before the name of the report taxonomy, I'd rather reverse the order.

Can anyone point me to a simple guide to alleviate at least these four problems? Greater customizability would be helpful, but I need to address these for a minimum viable newsletter before getting fancy.

Answer 1

This happens because this is the default HTML to Plaintext conversion that Drupal is applying to all mails.

If you don't want this, either adjust the templates (you can find them in the theme folder, just copy to your theme and start adjusting it) to avoid HTML or enable a module like Mime Mail that allows to send HTML formatted mails.

No idea why the title is cut off.

Answer 2

Berdir is right, but I like to use the HTML Mail module instead of Mime Mail. (I show how to do this in a video series, but it's a paid series. If you want, you can check it out at http://modulesunraveled.com/simplenews. But basically you want to use the HTML Mail module.)