Postie and rich text formatting problems

Hi,

We installed the Postie plugin so that our blog can accept emailed articles. Before Postie, articles would show up all garbled – there would be random line breaks, and strange character groups usually with an = sign would be sprinkled liberally throughout. Now, most of the problems people seem to have with the whole blog-by-email thing is making it operate properly (setting it up with a POP3 server, problems with Gmail’s POP3, or crons). That’s all fixed for us. Our issue is figuring out why the formatting on the emailed articles is all screwed up. So we installed Postie.

With Postie installed, articles emailed from a Yahoo email address seem to look sort of normal. However, they show up in PLAIN TEXT (no bold, italics, font sizes, etc) on the blog. Also, there are no paragraph breaks (it’s like pressing ‘Enter’ does nothing – we want the blank lines between paragraphs to show up, and they don’t).

Articles emailed from a Gmail email address have no body at all (the missing body bug was supposedly fixed before we even got Postie), unless the email was in plain text format. This is quite infuriating.

Articles emailed from Outlook (using some POP3 server) come out all garbled and malformatted, just like before Postie was installed.

We are quite stumped here. It seems we’re missing something simple and fundamental, because no one else seems to be fustrated by this infuriating effect. Emailed pictures post fine, by the way. We are using a POP3 server for our incoming emails. It’s a localhost server, so it’s not a Gmail address or anything. Is it something we have to change in WordPress/Postie? Or do we have to configure the email address that accepts the posts differently? I have only the tiniest of clues as to how to read php stuff, and I don’t know much about the workings of email either.

If you could help out, your help would be graciously appreciated.

Thanks.