Blog-by-email, postie, and text formatting

Hi,

We installed the Postie plugin because the WordPress’s email-to-post feature would garble the formatting of the messages it received, inserting line breaks at will and putting in = signs everywhere. Having postie installed fixed the problem somewhat, but not entirely.

The plugin is set up properly, doesn’t misbehave, gets the mail it’s supposed to receive. But…

1. Mail sent from a yahoo account works fine now (it didn’t before). However, no formatting shows up (ie if text is bold, it’s not bold when it gets posted). It also completely ignores the spaces between paragraphs.

So two paragraphs end up looking.
Like this.

Not

This, which is what I want.

2. When I send a post from a gmail account, the body of the message doesn’t show up at all unless the message is plain text (not rich text). Why is this happening?

3. Messages sent from outlook still look garbled and have = signs everywhere and stuff.

Am I missing something obvious here? I know little about the inner workings of email, so is there something I have to do to the server on the receiving end of things? Is this a WordPress thing?

Thank you for your help with this.