Hi, and thank you for your reply.

I ran 'Select TextPlain FROM DistListEmailTbl' and looked at it in Text View. The text looked like this:

Dear Committee Member,

We'd like to invite you to etc.

But no sign of a carriage return or (char) 13 ... or anything else. Would you expect that these would still be invisible?

This proves there is some sort of a return in there, I'd like to know exactly what it is. Users are pasting data into the Rich Text box from Outlook where they use Word as a text editor. What gets pasted in there is truly awful. Loads of Office specific tags, references to style sheets that don't exist outside Office etc etc. The plain text generated by the Rich Text box's HTMLTextBox1.Plain method, is not accurate - so I want to write a routine to strip all the HTML tags out of the text - to create my own 'plain text' version. What should I embed as a carriage return that will go into the Sql Server field and, when retrieved, provide carriage returns in email clients that only interpret plain text and which, for example, are running on UNIX - not Windows.?

Thanks again.