How to Remove Extra Spaces in Gmail and Outlook

Email text picks up extra spaces the same way any pasted text does: from a webpage, a Word document, or a forwarded thread with its own leftover formatting. Where you fix it depends on which app you're writing in.

Outlook desktop has Find and Replace

Outlook's Windows desktop app writes emails with the same editor as Word, so the same Find and Replace dialog works the same way:

Click Replace All more than once if needed, until Outlook reports that zero replacements were made.

Gmail and Outlook on the web have no Find and Replace

A webmail compose window, whether Gmail or Outlook on the web, has no search-and-replace command inside it at all. There's nothing to open and no pattern to type. The reliable fix is to clean the text before it goes into the draft: paste it into the free tool, copy the result, then paste that into the email.

Removing blank lines in an email

None of the three, Outlook desktop included, has a one-click way to remove every blank line from a draft. Outlook desktop's Find and Replace can search for a paragraph mark the same way Word does, but for a forwarded thread with blank lines scattered through several layers of quoted replies, running the text through the free tool once is faster than building a search pattern.

Signatures carry spaces you can't see

A signature pasted in from another email or built with a signature generator often carries extra spaces or non-breaking spaces around the name, title, or links. They're invisible in the compose window and only show up once the email is received and viewed in a different app, which can render the spacing differently.

For a draft in any of the three, pasting the text into the free tool before it goes into the email catches all of this in one step, whether or not the app you're writing in has a Find and Replace command at all.