I am working on an automated emailer based on the one in Automate the boring stuff. It works well except when I try to read it using Thunderbird. (Seriously I have read the exact same email through Gmail's website and Thunderbird and they are different)

With the line smtpObj.sendmail('[email protected]',To,'Subject: test \n' '\nDear ' name '\nCan I order the following from you?\n \n' body

                 '\nChris \nKPFA Radio')

It would look correct in Gmail and Hotmail, but until I put the extra /n before "Dear", It would put Subject: Test Dear Chris as the subject
and simply '\nChris \nKPFA Radio' as the main part of the email. None of the actual details of what I want to order from people.

I have coded around it by just trying various things until it worked, but I don't know why. Is Thunderbird just written to interpret the message differently ? Is it not following standards or are standards just loose.

Since I want to use this mailer at work, sending out real work related emails to outside people, how can I be sure that there aren't other 'gotchas' out there . I don't know what email client they will be using and I can't ask them if they got my previous email without it looking odd. (These are established vendors, so it's not spam, it's just that asking if they got the last email may not look professional to them).