In one of our projects we are generating text/plain mails to be sent to the clients.For this we are formatting the mail something like the following
Billing No : xxxx

Item Desc Qty Rate
aaa 1 12.50
bbb 2 5.00

The above format is displayed correctly in yahoo and hotmail.But when a gmail user gets it he/she gets the thing as follows:

Billing No : xxxx

Item Desc Qty Rate
aaa 1 12.50
bbb 2 5.00

why is the formatting being changed also few lines are displayed in color while others are not. Does gmail override the formatting we do.

This is urgent.

thanx

I suppose your upper example relied on a monospace font as well as spacing being kept... my forum ignored that. I guess Gmail does the same – remove double spaces, double breaks, etc. Also, as you said, they sometimes change the color in order to e.g. display a signature differently.

As for a solution: use tables and HTML mail.

thanx for the response Lenssen,
but a user can either subscribe for text mail or HTML mail during subscription.
And hence based on the selection we have to either send a text or HTML mail.So if the option is text we format it and send the mail as content-type='text/plain'.