The reply lost its formatting
Two separate things flatten a message, and they are both deliberate. The reading side sanitises incoming HTML aggressively and does not fetch remote images, so a message can look plainer in Connect than at your provider. The writing side composes structured text under the mailbox's signature rather than a designed layout. Lost styling is by design; lost words are not.
Which of the two you are looking at#
| Where you noticed it | Which side | What is happening |
|---|---|---|
| An incoming message looks plainer in Connect than in Gmail | Reading | The sanitiser removed what it will not render, and remote images were not fetched |
| A reply you sent arrived without your styling | Writing | The composer produces structured text and the mailbox signature, not a designed template |
| A pasted table or brand block vanished from a draft | Writing | Structure survives; styling that depends on stylesheets and remote assets does not |
| The recipient says it looked different again at their end | Neither | Mail clients re-render: dark mode, a plain-text preference, a narrow screen |
The distinction is worth settling first, because the two have different answers and only one of them is worth reporting. Reading is a safety decision that protects you. Writing is a design decision about what a business reply should be.
What the sanitiser does, and why#
Incoming HTML is treated as untrusted content, because it is: mail arrives from anyone. What renders is a reduced, safe subset, and everything that could act rather than display is removed. Remote images are served through a proxy rather than fetched by your browser, so opening a message does not tell the sender you opened it.
That is the trade being made on your behalf. A message stripped of a sender's layout is legible and safe; a message rendered exactly as designed would carry that sender's ability to load remote assets, count your opens and reach into the page. Business mail is also the ordinary route by which instructions aimed at an AI agent arrive, which is another reason the reading path is narrow.
What the composer does, and does not#
- Writes structured prose. Paragraphs, short lists and the substance of an answer. That is what a reply from a business normally is.
- Adds the mailbox's signature. Branding belongs there, per mailbox, so it is consistent and does not depend on what happened to be in a draft.
- Does not build a designed layout. No multi-column template, no background images, no styling that depends on a stylesheet arriving with the message.
- Does not preserve pasted styling. Content pasted from a document keeps its structure and loses its appearance.
If the message you need to send genuinely is a designed piece — an invoice layout, a brochure — the durable answer is to attach it rather than to rebuild it in the body. Attachments arrive as themselves and are not subject to any of this.
What Connect completed, and what it did not complete#
- Completed. It read the message, recorded it canonically, displayed it safely, composed a reply under the correct mailbox and signature, passed it through the send boundary and recorded the provider's acknowledgement. The words reached the recipient.
- Not completed. It did not reproduce the sender's visual design in the reading view, did not fetch remote images on your behalf, did not send a designed HTML layout, and did not preserve styling that was pasted into a draft. None of those were attempted and failed — they are not attempted.
What you can do, and what an administrator can do#
For an incoming message you need to see as designed, open it at your provider.
Result The original is intact there. Connect's copy is the safe rendering, not a replacement for the message.
Ask for the images to be loaded if you need them and trust the sender.
Result They come through the proxy, so loading them still does not report back to the sender.
Keep replies structurally simple and let the signature carry the branding.
Result The reply looks the same to every recipient, which is more than can be said for a designed layout.
Attach anything that has to look exactly right.
Result The file arrives as itself, independent of how any mail client chooses to render a body.
An administrator's controls here are the mailbox signature and the mailbox's own settings. The sanitiser is not a preference and is not loosened per workspace: a setting that let one workspace render arbitrary sender HTML would be a setting that turned the protection off for the people using it.
Escalate when text is missing rather than styling, when a message renders as an empty body while the provider shows content, or when an attachment referenced in a message never appeared. Those are content faults; the flattening described on this page is not.
Questions#
Can Connect be configured to render email exactly as the sender designed it?
No. The reduced rendering is what makes an untrusted message safe to open, and loosening it per workspace would remove the protection from the people relying on it. The provider's own view is where the original rendering lives.
Why did my pasted table lose its appearance in a draft?
The composer keeps structure and drops styling that depends on stylesheets or remote assets. For anything that must look exact, attach it — an attachment is not re-rendered by a mail client.
The recipient says my reply looked different to them. Is that this?
Usually not. Mail clients re-render on their own for dark mode, narrow screens and plain-text preferences. A reply built from structured prose and a signature survives that better than a designed layout does.