Can you provide:

• the entire raw commit message from SVN?
• the raw body of the email you received (redact any sensitive information, I'm only interested in the markup)?
• the raw body of the email Phabricator sent (find this mail in bin/mail list-outbound, then use bin/mail show-outbound --id <id> to extract the raw body; redact any sensitive information, I'm only interested in the markup).

Here's what this mail is generally expected to look like:

The middle section is the commit message rendered as remarkup, so it's expected that if you put **asdf** in a commit message you'll receive mail with bold text. It's possible that "We use cayenne..." might be indented two spaces in the raw message, then be formatted as a code block (giving it a monospaced style), and then not rendered with the background/border for some reason (because of your client?).

In most clients (here, Mail.app) code blocks should render in a style similar to the style used in the web UI, with monospaced text but on a grey background:

I've learned some interesting things.

The email I received did not have mime parts. Instead it had these headings

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"

and was completely base64 encoded. I'll look for a tool to decode it if you need, however I was able to extract the email from the server logs.

I note that my email settings are for HTML, but phabricator sent no plain text part as well.

From the server-side tool (neat tool by the way!), I extracted this:

<table><tr><td style="">andrey committed rC43345: #28898 Course.getRelatedToCourses() functionality was moved to CourseService..
</td></tr></table><br /><div><div><p>#28898 Course.getRelatedToCourses() functionality was moved to CourseService.getRelatedCoursesFor(). Now this functionality does not use cayenne relations feature to get the related courses.</p>

<div class="remarkup-code-block" style="margin: 12px 0;" data-code-lang="text" data-sigil="remarkup-code-block"><pre class="remarkup-code" style="font: 11px/15px &quot;Menlo&quot;, &quot;Consolas&quot;, &quot;Monaco&quot;, monospace; padding: 12px; margin: 0; background: rgba(71, 87, 120, 0.08);">We use cayenne query to get these courses directly for database. It allows exclude any influence of the cayenne snapshot implmentation on these relations</pre></div></div></div><br /><div><strong>AFFECTED FILES</strong><div><div>/willow/trunk/common/common-model/src/main/java/ish/oncourse/model/Course.java<br />
/willow/trunk/common/common-model/src/test/java/ish/oncourse/model/CayenneRelationTest.java<br />

I did discover that indeed there are two spaces at the start of the second paragraph. So remarkup is the culprit. It would be nice to turn that off since it is a little surprising in a commit message. Although it isn't too hard to avoid now we know it is there.

As for the additional (truncated) first line. Perhaps that makes more sense in a git world where it is common practice to have a short first line, limited to maybe 100 characters. I know github strongly encourage this sort of behaviour.

It would be nice to disable this behaviour for those who don't want the commit message repeated or truncated. Even in your example above, the commit message is repeated.

Finally, the change in fonts looks like it is due to the first time we see the commit message is it wrapped in a one row one cell table. And the second time it is wrapped in two divs and a p.

For my part I'd love to just get rid of that that first table and everything inside it. The author and commit number are in the email subject and from.

Thanks
Ari

I know I didn't retrieve all the info you asked for, so let me know if you want to see anything else or want me to decode the base64 email body.

I know you have focussed on the missing background, but I'm not overly fussed about that. But I am surprised that the commit subject shown twice in a row, once truncated inside a table and once not, is anything else but a bug.

Users really want to read the same thing twice like that?

Well, its your project. As soon as I find the correct template file I'll adjust it and be happy.