When used for example as a "contact us" form and given a TextArea field, the TextArea uses a rich text editor that generates HTML.  That HTML then gets entity encoded before being inserted into the mail (email or wG mail), making it look like the attached image, with ulgy "<br />"s appearing in it.

Wobject/DataForm.pm calls $form->getValueAsHtml in getRecordTemplateVars().  Form/Textarea.pm's getValueAsHtml() calls WebGUI::HTML::format($value, 'text').  That entity encodes it.  This makes "getValueAsHtml()" a misleading method name.  That should be called "getEntityEncodedHtml()" or something if it is going to do that.

This should probably use WebGUI::HTML::filter instead in this.

Is there a reason that this works how it currently does?

I could try to fix it (pretty slammed right now; and no, I'm not dead, just trying to bank time/money with another hell project so I can get back to writing code that's broadly useful to people) but I don't have a running wG7 environment, so I'd have to set that up first before I could test a fix.

This is the result of investigating sysred's report from http://www.webgui.org/etcetera/html-tag-in-mails.  I reproduced it on a wG demo instance.

Thanks.