Geoff,

The system stores the message both in its final form, with line breaks and paragraphs inserted; and its raw form, exactly as you entered it. When I took a look at the raw data I saw that you'd put in line breaks manually, exactly where the lines break in the final displayed message. When the system formats the raw message for display, it translates the line breaks you entered into HTML tags. This is normal and by design.

Usually we see this happen when people copy large blocks of text from somewhere like a Web page, and past the text into the message form. Copying picks up the line breaks from the source material and faithfully pastes them into the message. Pressing Return yourself will, of course, do the same thing.

Don't try to format the text yourself. Remember that the way text looks in the message form isn't how it will look when your message is posted, because the message form uses a different font and is a different size. Let the system do the formatting for you.