Ideally, when you send VHS Talk a message via email, it should attempt to retain formatting by parsing it with markdown syntax rules. Sending messages from Gmail, I find everything gets run together in a single paragraph.
Looking a little deeper, Gmail sends multipart/alternative messages with text/plain and text/html parts, so Discourse should really be able to just grab the text/plain bit and apply its markdown parsing. But since it can’t, maybe we can get around it if Gmail has a a ‘plain text only’ setting? It turns out that Gmail does have that setting, but when you send such a message to Discourse you get a reply like so:
We’re sorry, but your email message to [“staff@talk.vanhack.ca”] (titled Testing text/plain from Gmail) didn’t work.
We couldn’t find any content in the email. Make sure that you wrote something at the top of the email - we can’t parse inline replies. If you’re getting this and you did include content, try again in UTF-8 plain text (no HTML).
Umm, thanks? Anyway, because the email gateway is important to us I just wanted to point out where we stand with this issue. I will try to follow this up with the Discourse team.